Seventy-seven years on the East Yorkshire lawyering tradition. The Beverley office sits in Highgate House, a Grade II listed Georgian townhouse on the corner of Wednesday Market and Lord Roberts Road, two minutes on foot from Beverley railway station and ten minutes from the Minster. The desk is led by Craig Schofield (Associate Director, Beverley Branch Manager and conveyancer since 2003). Residential conveyancing is the lead instruction; wills, lasting powers of attorney, settlement agreements and family law sit alongside it.
The Beverley office is not a generalist high-street practice. It is a residential conveyancing desk with a private-client group sitting alongside, plus a single employment-settlement specialism and the firm-wide family department behind it. The grid below reflects what the Beverley desk actually does at the Wednesday Market door, weighted accordingly.
The spine of the Beverley desk. Sales, purchases, transfers of equity, remortgages, lease extensions, declarations of trust, new-build and shared-ownership. Craig Schofield (Associate Director, conveyancer since 2003) supervises the department and is the named principal on the file. Fixed-fee quotes given in writing before instruction, with a transparent statement of the search fees, the Stamp Duty Land Tax bill and the Land Registry fee on top.
Leads Craig SchofieldSingle wills and mirror wills for couples, including tax-aware will drafting for estates that sit above the residence nil-rate band. Obtaining the grant of probate and full estate administration where instructed. Declarations of trust between unmarried co-owners, life-interest trusts where there are children from previous relationships. Drafted at the Wednesday Market desk and signed in front of two witnesses in the meeting room.
Leads The private client teamHealth-and-welfare lasting powers of attorney and property-and-financial lasting powers of attorney, drafted, signed, witnessed and registered with the Office of the Public Guardian. The work to do in your sixties and seventies, while you can speak for the document. Couples often instruct both, named on each other, with a child or two named as replacement attorneys.
Leads The private client teamCompromise (settlement) agreements for employees being offered a settlement on the way out. Reviewed at the Beverley desk and signed off by a solicitor as the law requires. The employer usually pays the legal fee; the employee receives independent advice on whether the offer is fair, what the without-prejudice protection means in practice, and what the restrictive covenants will hold them to after the leaving date.
Leads The employment deskDivorce and financial remedies, pre-nuptial agreements, child arrangements and contact, and public-law children proceedings where the local authority has begun care proceedings. Jane Moore heads the firm-wide Family department. The Beverley desk takes the initial instruction and routes the work to the right hand on the firm-wide team.
Leads Jane Moore (Head of Family)The lawyering tradition the modern firm continues runs back to 1949. The predecessor practices that merged to form Lockings (Swaine Allen Solicitors and McBirnie Wallis Solicitors among them) still appear on the SRA register as alternative trading names, and the four current director surnames (Swaine, Allen, McBirnie, Wallis) match those predecessors.
The Beverley office occupies Highgate House, a Grade II listed Georgian townhouse built around 1756 by Priestman and Clarkson, which once housed Dr Bolton (a well known local physician) and was purchased in 1785 by General Oliver De Lancey. The building was later partly remodelled when Lord Roberts Road was cut alongside it. The Wednesday Market square itself has held a market since the medieval Fish Market era and was granted its market charter in 1573.
Today the firm is Lockings Legal Services Limited, incorporated at Companies House on 1 October 2014 under number 09244568, authorised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority as a licensed body from 1 May 2016, SRA 626081. Three offices: Beverley (Highgate House on Wednesday Market), Hull (St Mary’s Court on Lowgate, the registered office) and York (Swinegate Court West). The Beverley desk is led by Craig Schofield, the residential-conveyancing principal.
“I am passionate about client service and doing a good job for them.” Craig Schofield, Associate Director and Beverley Branch Manager, on the Beverley desk
The Beverley office is the people in it. Craig Schofield runs the branch and the residential conveyancing department. The card below carries his role, his start year on conveyancing, and one paragraph on the work he owns at this desk. The wider firm-wide team (forty-plus people including the Family department under Jane Moore, the Commercial Property department under Richard Allen, and the Private Client lawyers) sits behind him when the matter calls.
Runs the Beverley office and the residential conveyancing department. Twenty-two years on residential conveyancing, the bulk of those on East Yorkshire and East Riding sales and purchases. The named principal on the file when you instruct a Beverley conveyancing matter, with the team behind him for the day-to-day.
“I am passionate about client service and doing a good job for them.”
Beverley is a market town built largely from East Yorkshire chalk-stone and Tadcaster limestone, the same family of stones that built the Minster. The local conveyancing market reflects that: a steady flow of period houses in North Bar Within, North Bar Without, the Westwood quarter, Walkergate and the Saturday Market terraces. Each one has its own quirks (a flying freehold, a chancel-repair liability, an unregistered title from before the 1990 compulsory-registration cut-off, a Section 106 obligation from a Cherry Burton or Tickton estate). Craig Schofield has been a conveyancer since 2003, and the Beverley desk reads those quirks for a living.
A short enquiry form for an initial response by telephone or email. Once we understand the matter we quote a fixed fee where the work supports it, or hourly with an estimated total where it does not. We say so in writing either way.
The office is two minutes on foot from Beverley railway station and ten minutes from the Minster. Wednesday Market itself is the triangular square north of the Minster, smaller than Saturday Market and quieter on a weekday morning. Public parking at Wednesday Market and the Norwood multi-storey are a short walk away.
Highgate House
19 Wednesday Market
Beverley HU17 0DJ
The same firm. Lockings Legal Services Limited (SRA 626081, Companies House 09244568) operates three offices: Beverley (Highgate House, 19 Wednesday Market), Hull (St Mary's Court, Lowgate) and York (Swinegate). The lawyering tradition the firm continues runs back to 1949. The four current director surnames (Swaine, Allen, McBirnie, Wallis) match the predecessor-firm names registered with the SRA (Swaine Allen Solicitors, McBirnie Wallis Solicitors), so what you walk into at Wednesday Market is a 77-year East Yorkshire lawyering tradition with a Hull head office and an active Beverley branch.
Yes. The Beverley desk publishes a fixed-fee quote in writing for a residential sale, a residential purchase, a transfer of equity, a remortgage or a lease extension before any chargeable work begins. Search fees, the Land Registry fee and any Stamp Duty Land Tax sit on top of the legal fee and are itemised separately in the same quote. Where a matter is genuinely unusual (a defective title, a probate sale running alongside, a leasehold with a missing freeholder) we say so in writing and quote hourly with an estimate before we charge anything.
Within one working day on weekdays. The form goes to the Beverley office and is read first thing on the next working day. We confirm the matter type, the named lawyer who will be on the file, and either a fixed-fee quote on the same email or a short request for the two or three pieces of information we need before quoting. If the matter is urgent (a contract exchange tomorrow, a probate deadline falling this week), telephone the office on 01482 300500 and we will take the call live during office hours.
It depends on three things, in order: whether the named executors are still able and willing to act, whether the residence nil-rate band rules introduced in 2017 are correctly read against the value of your house today, and whether your family circumstances have moved on since the will was drafted (a remarriage, a grandchild, a beneficiary who has died). We will read the existing will in the meeting at no charge, tell you whether redrafting is the better answer, and quote a fixed fee if it is. Often a codicil is enough.
Yes. A settlement agreement is only legally binding if you receive independent advice from a relevant adviser (in practice, a solicitor) and the solicitor signs an adviser certificate confirming so. The employer almost always agrees to pay a contribution towards your legal fee; the Beverley desk reviews the offer, explains what each clause means (the without-prejudice protection, the restrictive covenants, the reference wording, the tax treatment of the lump sum), and tells you whether the figure is reasonable for the circumstances. We turn most settlement agreements around within two working days.