100-110, CROMFORD HILL

A row of six houses on Cromford Hill, Cromford, built in the 1780s from gritstone with gritstone dressings. They were constructed for Richard Arkwright to provide accommodation for workers at his textile mills. The row rises up the hill and has three different roof levels. The construction is of coursed rubble with plain tiled roofs, and features three shared red and black brick ridge stacks.

The houses are laid out in a plan typical of Richard Arkwright’s Phase I designs, with three storeys and a single unit, with rear service areas under a catslide roof. Side stairs are positioned against side walls and rear walls. Each house has a two-bay front elevation; the entrance bay lacks windows above the ground floor, while the other bay has two-light, flush stone-mullioned windows to all floors. The doorways have flush dressed jambs, substantial rectangular lintels, and crude capitals and bases to the imposts, all worked with tooling. All doorways remain intact, as do the window surrounds, and the mullions to numbers 100, 104, 110, and the upper floors of number 106. Twentieth-century casement windows and glazed or half-glazed doors are present. Original single-light window surrounds are found to the rear, along with later extensions dating to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.