25-35, FORE STREET

A range of houses, now shops and offices, dating to the late 17th and early 18th centuries, with alterations in the 19th and 20th centuries. The building is timber-framed, with plastered walls, some masonry lining, and brickwork in an English Garden Wall bond to the east gable end. The rear is weatherboarded and features an old tiled 'M' profile double roof with broad overhanging eaves and a cornice, though the front slope of No. 33 has concrete tiles. Brick chimneystacks are present.

The building originally had a 7-bay frontage, but this was truncated in 1880 by the construction of Market Street and again in the mid-1930s for road widening. There are four box dormers with 19th and 20th-century casements, a single 20th-century gabled casement dormer, and one original 18th-century casement dormer with a moulded wood cornice and hipped roof. The first floor has seven windows: two 19th-century triple sash windows with plate glass, three triple sashes with a 4:12:4 pane configuration, a canted oriel bay with a 4:12:4 paned triple sash, and a single flush-set 12-pane sash window on the right.

The ground floor of No. 25 has an early 20th-century shopfront with plate glass windows. Nos. 27-31 have a shop window fitted in the 1980s, with a bow front and glazing bars that replicate the appearance of a late 19th-century photograph. No. 31 features a 19th-century shopfront with arcaded windows, an early 20th-century blue tile stallriser, and a timber fascia with a dentil and modillion cornice. No. 33 has a 1950s timber shop window with panelled stallriser and a bold moulded cornice.

The rear of the building has long one and two-storey outshuts, weatherboarded with stuccoed underbuilding.

Internally, the ground floor has been much altered and opened up. No. 31 retains its original arrangement of front and rear rooms, with central fireplaces, a closed string staircase with a column newel and stick balusters, and a rear first-floor room with an 18th-century sash window with quadrant bars. The attic has an 18th-century plank battened door with strap hinges. The roof structure retains the original butt-purlin principal; there’s a cellar with red brick walls. Nos. 27 and 29 were internally rebuilt in the mid-1980s and are now used as a savings bank and offices. The first floor has an exposed wall plate with mortices for studs in the rear wall, and the attics have a modern raised ceiling above the collars. The roof retains pegged and halved rafters, and the rear roof has been raised to form a catslide over enlarged attic rooms.