Layfield House

A railway worker’s house, built circa 1840, for the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR). The house is constructed of dark red brick in an English garden wall bond, with five courses of stretchers to one of headers. It has a Welsh slate roof with overhanging eaves, and brick and stone stacks. The building rises from a slight plinth and is four bays wide, with windows and a small, single-storey entrance bay to the north-west. The entrance bay has a boarded door and a four-pane overlight. The sash windows have glazing bars and are set in six-inch reveals with slightly-cambered gauged brick arches and projecting, bracketed stone cills. Shorter trompe l'oeil windows are on the first floor, facing the road, with similar cills but without brackets. The road elevation retains an S&DR ceramic plate marked ‘D 13’. There are two chimneys to the ridge, one in the centre, which is brick, and one to the right gable, also brick but with a stone cornice. Nine-pane sashes are in the upper windows to the gable ends. Later rear extensions are not of special interest.

Layfield House's original narrow footprint resulted from being built between the S&DR’s Yarm branch line and the road. The building was constructed in two stages; the earliest section was the slightly smaller pair of south-eastern bays, possibly shown on the 1841 Tithe Map, with the full four bays depicted on the Ordnance Survey 1:2500 map surveyed in 1855. The earlier section may have been built as a weigh house for the Yarm depot in 1826, but it is more likely that it was constructed around 1833 by the S&DR as accommodation for a railway worker for the depot. The ceramic plaque (marked D 13) indicates it was a residential property belonging to the S&DR. The house was likely sold off by the railway around the time the original Yarm depot closed in 1872. By the 1881 census, the property, then known as Layfield House, was occupied by a veterinary surgeon.