Should you ever meet a film director scouring the capital for a perfect Victorian street scene in which to set his latest period drama, do recommend Barkham Street.There is just one snag - its not in London it's in Wainfleet.

The Grade II listed street is the most perfect early Victorian metropolitan throughfare, you will ever see. While it would be quite remarkable in Lambeth, in Wainfleet with a population of 2,000, it is astonishing.The 19 houses of Barkham Street have a romantic - and possibly fanciful history. In the 18th century, much of Wainfleet, an agricultural town that was the hub of many farms,was owned by Sir Edward Barkham, of the East India Company, to whom there are many local memorials.

On Sir Edward's death, his estates were transferred to the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, in London, to whose trustees tenants paid their rent. However in the 1840's some of the Wainfleet properties were in a poor state of repair and the tenants asked to be rehoused. The consulting architect to the Bethlehem Hospital was the respected designer Sydney Smirke. Smirke the son of the celebrated illustrator Robert Smirke, had learn,t his craft as a pupil of his famous brother Sir Robert Smirke.

Sir Robert, who moved in the most illustrious circles, is best remembered for the capitals General Post Office in St.Martin's-Le-Grand and for the British Museum, the facade of which was completed in 1847.It was in that year that his brother Sydney was asked by the Bethlehem trustees to attend to the needs of their tenants in distance Wainfleet.

It has been suggested, probebly romantically, that the Bethlehem Estate Office drawer marked "W" was withdrawn, and instead of Wapping appearing, Wainfleet was mistakenly picked.What is more likely is that Sydney Smirke had never heard of Wainfleet and, imagining that land there was at as much a premium as land in the capital, promptly designed a street to fit his normal Bethlehem briefs.

A firm of builders from Hull called Forman and Frow were commisioned to build the street exactly to Smirke's plans, for £7,449. And so , to local amazement - which endures to this day - a street identical to any on the Bethlehem Estates was erected in deepest Lincolnshire.

After the First World War, the Bethlehem Hospital began to dispose of its Lincolnshire buildings. Barkham Street, as a whole was bought by a local builder, J.T Turner and Sons, a firm founded in 1870 which had , for many years, attended to the Bethlehem Hospital Estates needs. The company still owns the entire street. In the 1960's the houses were given a much needed face-lift and, in the past four or five years, a total restoration has taken place. The splendid iron railings, which were removed during the Second World War in the drive for scrap metal, have been replaced in replica.

David Turner, the company's joint director, says " My grandfather bought the street in 1920, largely because we did all the local work for the Bethlehem Estates". " We let houses, they never come up for sale. We could let them five times over, such is the demand for housing in this part of the country".

This extract was from an issue of the Daily Telegraph 2001