21, High Street

This is a late 16th and 17th century building, originally shops and flats, situated on the High Street in Saffron Walden. The front of the building is timber-framed and rendered, with a gabled plain tile roof. It has two 20th-century gabled dormers with small panes and a painted timber moulded parapet cornice. The first floor has two small, tripartite double-hung sash windows with heavy moulded horizontal plaster panels, considered the finest example of 17th-century work of its kind in Essex. A full-width 19th-century shopfront features a fascia, consoles, and reeded end-pilasters. A door leading to the flat is accessed via a passage and has two large moulded panels and a horizontal fanlight above. The shop front has three windows, one part of a former canted bay window with double-hung sashes, each with one vertical glazing bar, and a recessed entrance serving two shop units. The rear elevation includes two gables, one to the south being a wide stair tower, and a very large stack to the rear of the north gable. A long two-storey rear wing has a gabled plain tile roof, a large stack through the roof, some old leaded light casements, and horizontally sliding windows. Various lean-to roofs cover the stairs. A long 19th and 20th-century single-storey rear wing of painted brick extends to the west.

The front range is a high-quality late 16th-century merchant's house with two unequal bays, originally jettied. The larger, north bay (solar parlour) includes a roll-moulded spine beam, a rear wall stack with canted sides, and a mantel beam with leaf stops. Each bay formerly had a front wall with an oriel and flanking frieze window with moulded mullions, with rebates for glazing. Bracing is internal and markedly cranked. A cross partition shows evidence of a former door head against the rear wall. The roof comprises four equal bays with side purlins and arched windbracing, which has since been removed. Numerous old doors and fragments of panelling remain.

A rear 16th-century wing is present, featuring a back-to-back stack with the rear wall stack and a panel of herringbone brickwork within an inglenook. Floor joists have soffit tenons and diminished haunches, with traces of a stair opening. A further bay of framing is located to the rear of this wing, potentially dating to an earlier period. The building includes a flint and rubble lined cellar, now part of a restaurant, featuring the base of the main stack and storage niches. A section of the front wall is constructed of old red brick. A margin-glazed and coloured glass window in an early 19th-century borrowed-light window is located on the rear elevation.