3 & 5, Stratford Road

Two cottages, formerly a single house, dating from the late 17th century or very early 18th century, perhaps incorporating some earlier fabric, with extensions of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The building is at least partially timber framed, with the ground floor partly clad in limestone and the remainder and first floors in brick. It is set under plain clay tile roofs with brick stacks.

The original house was a two-room plan, oriented roughly north-south. The building is of two storeys and four bays. The ground floor of the original building is in stone, with the southern extensions and the first floor in brick. The windows are timber casements of two and three lights set under timber lintels. The northern bay has two openings each to ground and first floors, with the northernmost on each floor being blocked. The northern return has some exposed timber framing and houses the entrance to number 3. The rear is rather irregular, with a succession of later extensions, though the original southern return is visible, constructed in stone. There are extensions to the rear of both cottages; number 3 has a small lean-to set against its northern wall, and number 5 has been extended by two full-height bays to the south.

The interior of number 5 retains very heavy section chamfered beams with scroll end stops to both ground and first floor, and ceiling joists. The original external wall plate is visible within the first floor rear extension. An inglenook fireplace survives in the ground floor of each cottage, and number 5 has a late 19th century cast iron fireplace in the first floor room above. The attic is partly accessible and has a simple A-frame truss and single purlins.

To the roadside, the properties are closely bounded by a stone wall with coped top, which has a Tudor-arched gateway leading to number 5; the wall forms part of the western boundary to the Warwick Castle estate.

Documentary records relating to the site are unusually complete for the period 1669 to 1790. It was formerly the site of St Leonard's chapel, which by 1669, when it was sold by John Cooper, a tanner, to the baker Jonathan Brookes for £65, was described as decayed and had fallen out of use as a chapel, being used as a barn instead. The deeds record the sale in 1703 by John Brookes to Richard Walker of the site, now described as a new messuage where stood decayed St Lawrence Chapel, occupied by a Nicholas Faulkener. This clearly implies that there was a largely new building erected on the site at this date. It continued in the Walker family's ownership until 1738, then in the Norton family until 1766, when it was sold to Thomas Pestell. By 1790 it was in the ownership of the Right Honourable George, Earl Brooke. At some point in the late 19th or early 20th century, the site was purchased by the Warwick Castle estate, on whose western fringes it sits, and in the mid-20th century was sold again. Ordnance Survey mapping shows that the building, in a slightly shorter form than the present footprint, was still a single dwelling in 1889; the earlier house had apparently been extended by one bay to the south during the 19th century. By 1905, the building had been divided into two cottages, in which form it remained until some point after 1925. It was extended to the south by a further bay in the mid-20th century.