history

Local & Co is housed in the former C.H.P Jordan Building located on Queen’s Street, Speightstown, St. Peter. Built sometime between the last quarter of the eighteenth century and first three decades of the nineteenth century, it is constructed primarily of rubble stone with the use of some bricks as decorative features. The thickness of the walls indicates a post -1780 build or possible rebuild as a protection against future hurricanes. However, the overwhelming use of rubble stone as a construction medium for the walls indicates a pre-1830s construction date of the structure. This is so because sawn limestone blocks became an almost standard feature of the construction of wall structures in Barbados in the 1830s.

The building has been used as a store house for sugar and rum, and been associated with a pier from the early nineteenth to mid twentieth century that facilitated trade with Bridgetown and the United Kingdom. In a special edition of the Sunday Advocate, Parish Edition 1996, that featured St. Peter, the late Elmer Jordan, nephew of C.H.P Jordan, spoke to the diversity of businesses that were run from the premises of the C.H.P Jordan Building, Queens Street. In addition to the sale of provisions, the C.H.P Jordan Building also served as a lumber yard and at one point in its history, as one of Barbados’ first soft drinks factories, also under the direction of C.H.P Jordan. Of course, running concomitant to the use of the building as a general provision store, its premises (its nearby pier and beach to the west of the building as noted earlier) would have also been used a processing site for the extraction of whale oil and meat from the mid nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth century. Shops, cafes, restaurants and even a bank have all called the C.H.P Jordan Building home throughout its history.

The building’s soul resides in the memory of the Jordan family whose possession of the property has straddled four centuries and witnessed the rise of their fortunes, tragedies and joys.