8, Old Cross

This is a late 16th-century shop, originally a house, with alterations from the 18th and 19th centuries. The building has a timber frame, plastered and colourwashed walls, and an old tiled roof with twin gables featuring heavy barge boards to the front. A substantial red brick chimney stack stands at the rear, with five diagonally set shafts and oversailing laps above a long projection.

The exterior displays two storeys and attic accommodation. The first floor has two lattice-glazed casement windows, and a small wood casement dormer set high in the left gable. The right gable has a single lattice casement window with applied studding. The ground floor features a six-panel door with the upper two panels glazed, sheltered by a flat hood, on the left, and an early 20th-century shopfront with full-length plate glass display windows subdivided by slender mullions, and a three-quarter-length glazed entrance door to the right. A carriageway with a pair of boarded doors, with a wicket in the right-hand leaf, is also present.

A long, two-storey timber-framed and plastered projection extends to the side, partly underbuilt in brick and stuccoed on the ground floor. The carriageway is weatherboarded with a glazed entrance door complete with architrave surround and hood on consoles.

The interior ground floor front room has an exposed ceiling beam and a large fireplace with red brick jambs. A rear room has been opened out, revealing mortises for studs and a three-light wooden mullion window in the ceiling. An additional 18th-century bay and a later 19th-century bay were added to form the outshoot. The first-floor rear room has a three-light unglazed wooden mullion window. An 18th-century newel staircase runs alongside the chimneystack. The attic contains a red brick arched fireplace. Roof rafters remain exposed with halved and pegged rafters, modern collars, and pegged rafters within the gables.

Historically, the building, together with number 6, originally housed Beckwith and Son, antique dealers in the late 19th century. While previously listed as a single item with number 6, these are now recognized as two separate buildings.