Kelvedon Labour Club

KELVEDON HIGH STREET TL 8618-8718 (north-west side)

10/175 No. 75 (Kelvedon Labour Club)

GV II

Parish workhouse, now a club with attached cottage. Early C17, extended in C18, C19 and C20. Timber framed, clad with painted brick, plaster and some weatherboarding, roofed with handmade red plain tiles. 4 bays aligned NW-SE (at right angles to road) with rear stack and one internal stack. C18 crosswing to front and 2 wings extending forwards. Stacks to rear of left wing and to left of right wing. Complex series of C20 extensions to left, rear and right. 2 storeys and attics. The front elevation has on the ground floor 2 early C19 sashes of 16 lights, and on the first floor one similar sash and one of 4 + 8 lights, in addition to C19 and C20 casements. C20 door in porch with fluted pilasters and flat roof. Roofs hipped to front. Chamfered transverse beams with lamb's tongue stops and plain joists of vertical section jointed to them with soffit tenons with diminished haunches, at both storeys. Original rebated hardwood floorboards in attic. Original clasped purlin roof with arched collars; some wattle and daub infill in rear gable, which is weatherboarded externally. In the attached cottage to front left one ground-floor room is fully lined with tongued-and-grooved and beaded softwood boarding, c.1900. The parish workhouse was closed when its functions were transferred to Witham Union soon after the Poor Law (Amendment) Act of 1834. In 1837 the building became the Kelvedon Labour Club. (B.L. Kentish, Kelvedon and its Antiquities, 1974, 48).

Listing NGR: TL8606018703