2, CROSS STREET (See details for further address information)

Terrace of houses and shops on a corner site at the junction of High Street and Cross Street. Mid 19th century in date, with shop fronts added or remodelled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The building is constructed in red brick with a Welsh slate roof and rises to three storeys. It forms an L-shaped double-depth plan with eight bays to the east-facing High Street front and four bays to the north-facing Cross Street front.

The most notable architectural feature is the Art Nouveau-style draper's shopfront occupying the north-east corner, with its main entrance positioned at the rounded angle. A single square column marks this corner, beneath which sits a recessed part-glazed door featuring a single segmental-headed pane over a fielded panel. Above the door is a dentilled bowed lintel and plain overlight. The shop windows flanking the corner entrance contain large full-height plate-glass panes – three lights to the Cross Street side and seven to the High Street side – with the individual lights divided by slender wooden shafts with shaped bases and capitals, and reeded upper sections carrying graceful interlaced glazing bars. A splayed-out frieze above originally carried carved lettering (now largely obscured by a 20th-century name board), and below sits a moulded cornice and shallow hood.

The High Street entrance to the left end of the draper's shopfront has a similar recessed plate-glass fielded-panel door with a dentilled bowed lintel and overlight. The right end of the Cross Street shop front is marked by a late 19th-century pilaster with ribbed panel and ribbed console featuring roundel ornament. Adjacent to the draper's shop along High Street is a further shop front with similar pilasters, consoles and splayed frieze, a recessed door with a single basket-arched pane over fielded panel beneath a moulded lintel and ventilator, and a two-light plate-glass shop window above a fielded-panel apron, with slender shafts and responds carrying carved Corinthian capitals and foliate spandrels with pendant drops.

To the left along High Street is a through carriage entrance with rounded angles beneath a timber lintel. The ground floor of No. 5 has been unsympathetically infilled in the 20th century with a board door and a pair of casements below a boarded frieze marking the position of a former shop front. The far left shop front, serving No. 11, retains a recessed 19th-century half-glazed panelled door and a later single-pane shop window in a 19th-century surround with foliate consoles, frieze, cornice and hood.

On the Cross Street front, an entrance adjoining the draper's shopfront has a doorcase with consoles, cornice and hood, with a panelled door beneath a moulded lintel and plain overlight. Further to the right is a round-headed passage entrance with a board door beneath a boarded panel and rubbed-brick arch. Between the two entrances is a late 19th-century four-pane sash window with a painted stone sill and cambered wedge lintel. The first floor has similar four-pane sashes, while the second floor retains original unequal nine-pane sashes, except where replaced by 20th-century casements on the High Street bays 2 and 3 and the Cross Street second-floor right bay. All windows are set in original surrounds with sills and cambered wedge lintels. The building is finished with a moulded wooden eaves board. The roof features a rounded hip at the corner, and has corniced axial stacks and an end stack to the south.

The rear elevation has twelve-pane first-floor sashes and nine-pane second-floor sashes.

The interior of the draper's shop contains cast-iron columns and a staircase with a moulded handrail, turned balusters and newel post, though the interior has not been fully investigated.