Staircase House

This is a town house, shop, and warehouse, now a cafe and shop. The building’s construction began in the late 15th century and has undergone multiple phases of rebuilding and enlargement in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is timber-framed with brick and wattle-and-daub panelling (much of the wattle-and-daub now replaced with brick), and has slate roofs.

The building's complex and irregular plan reflects its successive rebuildings and additions to the rear of a former two-bay cruck-framed range, originally parallel to the street. It is two and three storeys high, with cellars and basements, and has three structural bays (two to No. 30A, one to No. 31). The building demonstrates a particularly complete sequence of construction phases, beginning around 1460. Notable features include upper parts of two cruck frames, dendrochronologically dated to around 1460; extensive remains of original timber-framed side, rear and internal walls; remains of originally unglazed wooden mullioned windows in the basement; ground and first-floor beams with ovolo and quarter-round moulding; an exceptionally fine cage-newel staircase with open strapwork panelling and carved newels; a room at first floor in the rear wing of No. 30A featuring almost complete 17th-century muntin-and-rail panelling; and a suite of two rooms on the first floor of the front range, containing fine early 18th-century bolection-moulded panelling (partly missing and loose at the time of inspection), including dado rails, doorways with eared architraves, and a cross-corner fireplace with a date stone in the overmantel, lettered "16 S 18 / M I E." The building was in poor structural condition when inspected in 1992.