30 High Street

30 High Street is a 16th-century merchant's house that was remodelled and re-fronted in the mid-19th century. It is constructed of red brick laid predominantly in Flemish bond with brick dressings. The front roof slope is clad in slate and the rear slope in black-glazed pantiles.

The house is located in a terrace on the east side of the High Street and has a rectangular plan. It presents two storeys and an attic with an irregular façade. The ground floor is dominated by a large bordered sash window with margin lights and a rebuilt gauged brick arch, a late 20th-century replacement of an earlier shopfront. To the left is a bootscraper in the form of an arch with a man's head at the top. The front door to the right is set within a wooden architrave of simple classical design with a panelled soffit and jambs. The door has six fielded panels under a plain overlight. The door to the left provides access to 29 High Street. The first floor is lit by two sash windows with bordered glazing bars, set flush in the wall. The attic is lit by a gabled dormer with a two-over-two pane sash window and glazed sides. The rear elevation is of three storeys owing to the slope in the ground. It has a full-height 19th-century canted bay window with plate-glass sashes; the middle sashes have margin glazing.

The ground floor contains a partitioned passage providing a hallway from the front door, but in the mid-16th century this was one room. It has roll-moulded cruciform bridging beams decorated on the under surface with relief-carved stylised vine trail. The joists are roll-moulded with splayed stops. Against the east wall is a fireplace with a timber chimneypiece of around 1580 featuring a roll-moulded bressumer, a strapwork frieze and an upper cornice with scrolled leaf-trail and an urn. The roll-moulded jambs are replacements. The back of the fireplace (but not the cheeks) is lined with 17th-century Delft tiles of a variety of designs including a windmill, ships, wild boar, houses and round urns containing flowers.

The staircase in the hall, dating to around 1700, has an open string, two twisted balusters per tread supporting a moulded handrail, and three heavy turned newel posts with ball finials. The original stair survives in the lower straight flight only. The understairs cupboard has an 18th-century two-panelled door with a spring latch.

In the east ground-floor room the cornice is enriched with egg-and-dart, and there is an early 18th-century eared fireplace with an egg-and-dart surround and stylised foliate corner blocks. The wooden fireplace is unpainted and contains a modern wood-burning stove.

Several fireplaces on the upper floors are features of note. One is located on the rear corridor of the first floor, above the ground-floor fireplace, which would probably have originally heated a bedroom. It appears to have become stranded in the corridor when this was created at the top of the staircase around 1700. The wooden, roll-moulded fireplace has a square-headed opening and a blocked grate surrounded by Delft tiles of a simple design depicting animals such as a camel, dog, deer and unicorn, and figures engaged in a variety of activities including fishing, playing musical instruments and carrying a sack.

One of the bedrooms retains a wooden fireplace with ogee brackets supporting a mantelshelf, and a cast-iron grate with a delicate swag design in relief. This is surrounded by Delft tiles, mostly of the same design showing a vase of flowers, except for two Chinese figures in the top corners. The tiles have been reused to decorate the fireplace which is not of 17th-century date.

In the kitchen to the rear (east) of the house, a large chimney breast indicates the former position of a wide hearth. This was later blocked up and an oven called the Patent Triplex Grate installed in the 1920s or 1930s. Manufactured by the Triplex Foundry Ltd of Tipton, Staffordshire (founded in 1918), the Triplex Grate was a triple function grate which heated the room, heated water and cooked food. Sometimes decorated with tiles, the doors on this example bear Delft or Delft-style tiles depicting ladies and gentlemen in landscape scenes.

To the left of the oven is a cast iron bread oven, a type that began to be produced by iron foundries in the 18th century. It has an unusually decorative door with a relief moulding of a cherub or cupid surrounded by a circular band of intertwining foliage and ribbons in a rococo style. It is possible that it was designed as an oven door but is more likely to be a reused fireback. The door to the small grate underneath has the maker's stamp 'Carron', an ironworks company established in 1759 that went on to become one of the leading ironworks companies in Europe.