207-209, HIGH STREET

This is a house, now two shops, dating to the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It was floored in the mid to late 17th century and altered in the 19th and 20th centuries. The building has a timber frame on a brick and flint base, with rendered walls and a slate roof to the front and machine-made clay tiles to the rear. The three bays have been widened to the rear, with short wings added to the left and right, potentially reflecting earlier divisions. The right-hand bay may originally have been storeyed. A passage through the building on the ground floor, to the right of the centre bay, may indicate the position of an earlier screen passage. The ground floor has a mix of 19th and 20th-century shop fronts on the front, while the first floor has three 19th-century, centred, and sash oriels. The roof has been raised. The left gable has a brick and flint base with roughcast render, showing the line of the original steeply pitched roof, and an 18th- or 19th-century brick stack above. A more recently truncated stack has been inserted between the centre and right bays.

Inside, there is exposed timber framing, with jowled posts and a mixture of curved and straight braces to cambered tie beams, cut to the centre bay. The building has a crown post roof. The original truss to the left of the centre bay features an unusually short crown post with an octagonal shaft, broached with spurs to a moulded square cap and base. From this springs an unmoulded square vertical member into which four-way braces to support the collar and collar purlin are jointed. Although the roof has been raised, some rafters remain in their original position. An inserted floor over the centre bay has stop-chamfered spine beams with run-out stops.