Baverstocks main office is in Witham, in a property called Dickens House. But why is this? As you might expect it’s a dickens of a story!
In the 1970s Baverstocks was looking for a new home.
Witham is well placed in Essex, with excellent road and rail links, so after careful consideration it was picked as the base of operations.
A search for available property yielded a terrific opportunity, a Georgian grade 2 townhouse right off the main street and with good parking.
The property was purchased, but the question of ‘what to call it?’ persisted. Everyone had great expectations that a suitable name would present itself.
The search for inspiration was accidentally fulfilled in London’s “The Old Curiosity Shop,” so-called because it was believed to be the exact store that served as the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ book of the same name.
This antique shop had a complete set of watercolours depicting characters from ‘The Pickwick Papers’ a Charles Dickens novel. The Witham property was Georgian, and Charles Dickens was a well-known Georgian author. The quest for what to call the property had been solved! It would be Dickens House.
The pictures were bought on the spot, and the pictures grace the walls of Dickens House to this day.
As Baverstocks grew, it expanded into the row of next-door properties. Today Dickens House boasts multiple boardrooms, offices, and is stacked full of computers.
Given that he wrote the following in his novel “David Copperfield” we couldn’t help but believe that Charles Dickens would have been pleased with the “can do” friendly team at Dickens House.
“The most important thing in life is to stop saying, ‘I wish’ and start saying, ‘I will’. Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.”
