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Littlewood Park East Lodge

The plaque above the window on the left reads simply A McL 1925. This refers to Sir Alan McLean, who had the big house and other buildings on the estate reconstructed by the architect George Bennett Mitchell in the 1920s and 1930s. The East Lodge stands on the site of an earlier lodge. Sir Alan, later Conservative MP for Norfolk South-west, was the son of David McLean, who had made his fortune backing the inventor of the Lamson pneumatic tube. This was a system used in big shops where a customer's cash was enclosed in a small cylinder and propelled by air pressure through a series of tubes to the central cashier, who then issued a receipt and returned it with the change to the sales point. Lamson pneumatic tubes were rendered obsolete by the arrival of credit cards in the 1970s.