Whichever way you walk down Bridge Street, Hereford, your eye is likely to be caught by a striking pair of buildings at Number 32 and 33, and visitors and residents alike have wondered about their past ... and future.

A plaque above the door offers one nugget of information – this was once the John Gwynne James Memorial Home for Nurses.

Hereford Times reader Pauline Jones said: "The John Gwynne Nursing Home was used by the midwives who lived there.

"They looked after and delivered babies born at home.

"My son was born in 1956 and was delivered by one of those marvellous midwives at home, as was my niece four years later."

Ian Forbes, a member of the Hereford Times Camera Club, took this picture of the building.

He said: "Over the years I’ve passed by this empty building many times. But why does it remain empty?"

In the middle of the 20th century the nurses, who were single and working at the then-Hereford Infirmary, would leave the ward and head to Bridge Street.

Another reader, Roger Hunt, said: "Back in the 1950s the top floor was used for apprentice painter and decorators.

"I attended one full day and two evenings there. Good memories!"

More recently the two houses, together with numbers 34 and 35, have been used as offices, at one time occupied by Welsh Water, by accountants and they housed the offices of the city council.

Behind the front doors of the four houses there are no longer four separate spaces, and the future of the building, which was sold last summer by Sunderlands, has yet to be revealed.

However, planning permission was secured by a previous owner to turn them back into four houses.

Alex Coppock, director of Communion Architects was retained to help with the planning process.

“They are listed buildings, and some are very fine listed buildings,” he explains.

“But they have been knocked together, and it’s something of an Alice in Wonderland experience as it’s a real rabbit warren.

“Number 35 is a beautiful Georgian building and still has many of its original features, and it should be easy to turn it back into a house.

"Next door, number 34 is a very nice Victorian house, and 32 and 33 have at their heart a Tudor house, which was then completely re-imagined by the Victorians, with the two houses made into one.”

In the gardens a bastion of the city wall is clearly visible and, Mr Coppock reports, with evidence too of the original terraces down to the river.