39 And 41, High Street

This is a house, originally one building but now divided into two, dating back to the 16th century. Around 1900, the front was renovated. The construction is timber frame, with a brick sill and roughcast plaster at the rear and ends, set on brickwork to the ground floor. The front is of plum brick, with a red tile-hung first floor and a wide band of scalloped tiles. It has a steep, renewed tile roof, with twin external chimneys on the rear wall, capped off in the 1940s. A rear extension contains an oven and a dairy, now with an asbestos roof.

The long, two-storey house is set back from the street and faces west, with four windows on each floor and two boarded doors. The windows are 3- and 2-light casement windows, and the ground floor windows have segmental arches. Inside, exposed timbers reveal a four-bay house, with jowled posts, straight braces connecting tie beams and wallplates, a clasped-purlin roof with collar and queen struts, curved quadrant tension braces in the gable and two framed crosswalls. The upper floor was previously open to the roof until recently being ceiled at collar level. A wallplate exhibits a squint-butted scarf joint with two edge pegs, and the framed walls have wide panels. In the south house (No. 41), a chamfered crossbeam supports the end of an axial floor beam in the hall, with a wide space before the framed portion of the south end bay, possibly indicating the former presence of a timber-framed chimney or a removed cross-passage. The north bay shows an exposed chamfered axial beam and square joists likely inserted in the 18th century. The building may have originally been a hall house with a storeyed parlour at the south end. A Boxmoor plaque number 678 is fixed to a beam in No. 41.