’The Model’ Built c1879. The town’s New Model Lodging House opened in 1888 with 72 beds, to remedy the low standards of the town’s existing, unhealthily overcrowded lodging houses. Yet however clean and well run ‘The Model’ might have been, the clientele continued to be vagrants, transient harvest works and labourers in local coal and stone yards. Anxious parents forbade children from going anywhere near the place. In reality, by the 1930’s, 8 Paradise Street largely accommodated harmless, isolated old men, surviving on handouts from local shops.
