23 and 23a, High Street

This building comprises a shop and flat, dating to the 16th century. It is timber-framed and rendered, with a distinctive first-floor front wall made of machine-made scalloped tiles. The roof is gabled, running at a right angle to the street and overlapping the roof of the adjacent property at number 25. A gabled rear range is also present, all covered in plain tiles. Decorative ridge tiles and a clay finial with a sunflower motif remain above the front gable.

The first floor features a canted two-sided oriel window with a hipped roof and coloured leaded lights in the lower section. The ground floor has a 19th-century fascia with a moulded cornice, a jetty, a central projecting 20th-century shopfront, and a recessed entrance to the north. A passage door, located at the south end, has a two-centred pointed arched head and an early 19th-century door consisting of six moulded recessed panels. A jettied rear range with a gabled plain tile roof, a 20th-century window, and later extensions to the rear are also present.

Inside, the early 16th-century cross-wing displays a crown-post roof comprising three bays – one short bay to the rear and a long forward bay over the solar. An unjowled intermediate post is also visible. An external wall brace is exposed within the building to the rear. The ground floor, originally open-framed to the north, retains short arch braces and braces running upwards from a shaped jowled storey post to the bridging joist. A partition between the shop and a south yard passage consists of rebated and chamfered posts and similar transoms at door head height. One panel of this partition has cambered vertical boards nailed to internal rails. The rear jettied range originally comprised two storeys and two bays, formerly containing two rooms of equal size on the ground floor. The jetty bressumer is now supported on a reused Corinthianesque cast-iron column. Historically, the building formed part of a hall house, with the open hall situated on the site of number 25.