St Edmund's Almshouse, entrance piers and flanking walls

St Edmund's Almshouse, Outney Road

St Edmund's Almshouse was built in 1895 to the designs of E Banham. It is constructed in red brick laid in Flemish bond with stone dressings and a plain red tiled roof.

The almshouse is a single-storey building facing south-west onto Outney Road, arranged on a long plan divided into eight dwellings. Rear extensions were added in the early 21st century.

The building is designed in a picturesque Tudor style with a symmetrical plan. The steeply pitched roof is embellished with decorative ridge tiles and five tall octagonal chimney shafts with moulded brick bases and star tops, arranged with the middle three as pairs. The principal elevation is defined by five gabled bays: the outer two are projecting cross-wings, and the inner three are half-hipped, all surmounted by terracotta finials and moulded bargeboards. The gable heads feature applied half-timbering in various styles of close studding with ogee braces. A band of terracotta Tudor roses runs along the bottom edge of the gables. The central gable, which is taller than those flanking it, contains a carved stone plaque with gothic trefoil arches bearing the date 1895 and the inscription "St Edmund's Homes" with entwined letters SE above.

The pairs of dwellings are accessed through loggias within the internal angles of the outer wings on each side of the central gabled bay. The loggias have brick plinths and timber turned balusters with carved octagonal timber posts and tracery heads, some forming trefoils and others ogee arches. The red and black quarry tiled floors remain intact, though the front doors beneath the original gauged brick arches are replacements. The central bay contains a six-light wooden oriel window with a central cinquefoil panel commemorating improvements and extensions carried out by the Town Trust in 1974. The outer bays have three-light mullion and transom windows; the left one is wooden with a moulded lintel and ogee aprons, while the right one is in stone with a hoodmould. The inner bays have two cross casement windows in blocked stone surrounds with hood moulds, those to the left having semicircular heads to the upper lights with trefoil tracery. Between the cross casements are brick buttresses with stone offsets, the upper ones carved into trefoils.

The rear elevation shows 21st-century additions consisting of rendered gabled extensions behind the original gabled bays with applied timbering to the gable heads, and flat-roofed red brick extensions in between with full-height windows and glazed doors.

The interior has been substantially modernised in two phases during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Of the original fixtures, fittings and finishes, only the window ironmongery survives. Inspection of one house found its arrangement to be representative of all dwellings.

The almshouse is set back from the road across a grassed lawn retained by a dwarf wall in red brick laid in Flemish bond with curved brick coping. The entrance is flanked by broached hexagonal piers surmounted by stone hexagonal domed caps.