31, High Street

31 High Street, Worcester

Former merchant's house, now a shop, dating from the late 14th or early 15th century. The building was internally remodelled probably in the early 17th century and extended to the rear with a new front in the early 19th century. It was restored in the late 1980s by FWB Charles.

The structure is timber framed with some replacement and renewal in 1988, featuring wattle and daub infill. The front is stuccoed and the rear range is built in Flemish bond brick. The roof is plain tile with a parapet and brick stacks.

The original medieval house consists of three bays arranged at right angles to the street, with a two-bay former open hall to the rear of a single-bay block containing a former shop at ground floor and accommodation above. The front was originally gabled and jettied to the first floor. Any medieval extensions beyond the surviving house have been lost. By the late 18th century they had been replaced by a three-storey range connected to the rear wall of the 15th-century range by a small hip-roofed block. An early to mid-19th-century two-storey range was added further to the rear.

The exterior presents four storeys and a cellar. A two-window front features 8/8-pane sashes on the first and second floors and 4/4-pane sashes on the third floor. The fine late 18th-century shop front has three fluted Ionic columns to a frieze with dentil cornice and 20th-century bowed glazing on the right. The entrance has an early 19th-century wrought-iron gate with the initials GR. A gilt figure of the Golden Lion is positioned above the first floor, regilded around 1990. The late 18th-century rear range features segmental brick arches over sashes, including two original 6/6-pane sashes and modillion eaves. The smaller 19th-century rear range has segmental header arches to its openings.

The interior reveals a two-bay hall with large-panel timber framing coated in orange ochre. The end trusses have arch-braced tie beams with clasped purlins and pointed-arched windbraces to each bay. The main central queen-post is distinguished by roll and quarter-round moulding to the soffit of the tie beam and jowled arch braces, with quarter-round moulding only to the arch bracing. Some original common rafters survive, pegged at the apex. Four-light diamond-mullioned windows, reconstructed in 1988, flank central wall posts on each side wall. A first floor was inserted probably in the early 17th century, evidenced by mortices for soffit tenons with diminished haunches in the inserted beam. The upper part of the rear wall retains a right-hand rebate for a 15th-century doorway that clearly led to a rear chamber block since demolished by the 18th century. A rebated door surround leads from the upper hall to the first floor of the front bay or chamber block. The front bay contains morticing indicating the position of a rear shop partition and assembly for the former jetty. First-floor ceiling joists were raised in the 18th century, exposing mortices in the bridging beam. Fluted pilasters with rosette blocks flanking the front windows date to the late 18th century. The front block was raised and its roof realigned parallel to the street, possibly in the 18th century, using late 16th or 17th-century trusses with trenching for purlins, which have been retained in the outer walls.

Documentary evidence shows that an influential Worcester man named John Walsgrove, also known as Flytt or Fleet, owned this house from around 1550. It passed to his son and grandson and became a public house from the mid-16th century, remaining so until the 1980s.