Have you ever noticed a brass plaque outside 24 Bridgeland Street, which reads ‘Rooker and Bazeley, Solicitors’? The antique Gothic script in the word ‘solicitors’ suggests there is a long history attached to the building, as indeed there is in houses up and down what is one of Bideford’s most emblematic streets. The difference is that while some have become dog grooming parlours and foreign food outlets, Bazeley, Barnes and Bazeley, at number 24, is still a solicitor’s office. 

But what of Rooker? That name is also associated with a different building in Bridgeland Street. From 1795 to 1832, the Reverend James Rooker was the Congregationalist minister at Lavington Church, opposite number 24. His wife was Sarah Lavington, daughter of Rev Samuel Lavington, who had been Minister of the Great Meeting House there for over fifty years and after whom the present church (constructed in 1859) was named. 

James and Sarah Rooker had two sons, James and William, who both became well-known Bideford solicitors. James Rooker (junior) was a ‘prominent dissenter’ against the Corn Laws in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1851, aged 48, census records show he was living in the house which is currently number 28 with two daughters aged 1 and 2, a son aged 5 months, his brother William, and four servants. It is likely that giving birth to three children in less than three years took its toll on Sarah Lavington since, by the next census in 1861, James Rooker was married to a new wife, Elizabeth. 

The son, Samuel Lavington Rooker, studied at Mill Hill and the University of London and also became a solicitor. In 1878 he was working as a clerk in Bridgeland Street with his father’s firm Rooker and Bazeley. That brass plaque is therefore around 150 years old. 

The Bazeley’s came from a different religious background. Francis Bazeley is recorded in 1861 as Rector of Bideford. His son, Henry Montague Bazeley, went into law and lived variously in Abbotsham Road, Belvoir Road, and Slade – in what was then called ‘Northdown Lane’. Both he and his son Henry Russell Bazeley ran the solicitor’s practice at 24 Bridgeland Street until at least 1921.

When Samuel Lavington Rooker died, unmarried, in his early forties, he left £12,237 to the Congregationalist minister at Lavington Church. His partner Henry Montague Bazeley survived until 1929 and left £9,164 to his son Henry Russell. 

Come to Bridgeland Street on 17 September for Heritage Open Days, organised by the Bideford and River Torridge Heritage Harbour in partnership with Bideford Bridge Trust. https://barthh.org/heritage-open-days-2026/