3-9, New Road

This is an early 19th-century pair of Regency-style cottages, located at 3-9 New Road, Darley Abbey. The two blocks were constructed around 1826 by the Evans family and are arranged as clusters of four houses. They were built using brick and have hipped slate roofs. The facades facing the street are stuccoed, with doorways set within recessed arches. The rear garden elevations of numbers 3 and 4 retain planked doors and upper-floor timber windows, incorporating ten-paned pivoted windows over ten-pane fixed windows, and ground-floor fifteen-over-fifteen pane sash and case windows. Both blocks maintain a pavilion-like appearance from all sides, and the elegance of their stuccoed facades is due to their direct line of sight from the former Darley House, the Evans family’s residence, which has since been demolished. These cottages represent an interesting variation on the cluster house arrangement developed at Darley Abbey and Belper.

The houses and schoolrooms of Darley Abbey, built or acquired by the Evans family for their workers, are historically significant as a group and offer a comparison to the Arkwright settlement at Cromford and the Strutt settlements at Belper and Milford.