22 And 24, St Andrew Street

This is an early 17th-century house on St Andrew Street, Hertford, that has been altered in the 19th century and extended in the 20th. It is now used as shops and offices. The house is timber-framed and covered in stucco, with a double-gabled roof covered in old tiles. The front of the building has elaborately decorated barge boards and finials in a Gothic style that dates from the early 19th century. The rear roof is covered in Welsh slate. A prominent brick chimney stack rises from the centre of the building, featuring two back-to-back shafts with an overhanging band and orange clay pots.

The building follows a double-depth plan with a projecting front. The front has two storeys and attic space. The first floor features two flush-set 12-pane sash windows within architraves. The attics have two small 6-pane sashes set high in the gables. The ground floor is recessed and sits below the jetty. A 6-panel door, the top two panes glazed, is set within a rusticated plaster surround on the left; this provides access to the adjoining building at number 26. A 19th-century shopfront is present, with a closed plate glass display window above a brown glazed brick stallriser, flanked by pilasters with foliated consoles. A three-quarter glazed door, with rusticated stuccoed pilasters, sits to the left of centre. A shop window at the right is divided into three lights by moulded mullions.

At the rear, a large lean-to outshut is present on the left, along with a two-storey weatherboarded outshut with an old tiled roof and a substantial external yellow brick chimney behind number 24.

The ground floor has been opened out to create a single retail area around a central chimney stack which originally served two rooms. Heavy exposed timbers are visible in the ceiling. A beam with mortices for studwork, running inwards, indicates a corridor, and a transverse beam with a chamfer, tongue stop, shutter grooves and mortices for a mullion suggest a former shop partition. An early 19th-century dogleg staircase, alongside the chimney stack (now exposed brickwork partly covered in old straw parging), leads to the first floor. The principal fireplace is located in the front right (east) room, with a much-repaired 17th-century plank door. The attic above the east rooms has two levels, indicating a raised ceiling at the front. The rafters have been largely renewed, but mortices for collars in a pair of halved and pegged rafters suggest a former crown post structure had been removed.