58, Abbeygate Street

BURY ST EDMUNDS

TL8564SW ABBEYGATE STREET 639-1/14/154 (South side) 07/08/52 No.58

GV II*

Offices, formerly a house and shop. Early C16 and C17, with C20 restored front. Timber-framed and rendered; the C20 plaintiled roofs, with pierced ornamental ridge-tiles and ball finials, have 2 steep gables facing the street. EXTERIOR: 2 storeys, cellar and attics; L-shaped plan with a narrower rear range aligned north-south. The western gable is wider than the eastern; both have plain barge-boards. 3 window range: small-paned sashes with cased frames in shallow reveals; a similar window in each of the gables. Late C20 shop front. The rear range, originally jettied on 2 sides, was underbuilt with C19 red brick and is now rendered externally, with the joist-ends, moulded embattled bressumer and corner-post of the jetty left exposed. The corner-post is lavishly carved with traceried designs to the shaft and blank shields to the curve of the top. The capital has a figure seated on a 4-legged creature which may be a centaur, with a bearded man's head wearing a head-dress with an eagle on top. The rider wears a tunic in late C15 style and is flanked by 2 other figures: on the right a bearded and cloaked man with bare feet and legs; on the left, on the other face of the post, a seated figure playing on a portable organ; all the figures are slightly damaged and may illustrate part of the legend of Hercules. INTERIOR: the front range has no exposed original features and the cellar is entirely modernised; vestigial side-purlin roof. The 2-bay rear range has timbers exposed and extensively decorated in both the ground-storey and 1st storey rooms: main beams with crenellated brattishing and a frieze in which florets alternate with trade emblems and lettering; supporting solid brackets with moulding and carved spandrels rest on moulded and crenellated capitals; crocketed shafts run down the main posts. Ogee-moulded joists; good close-studding. The main beams of the upper ceiling are not lodged over the wall-plates in the usual way, but are morticed into the sides of the main posts below wall-plate level, so that the tops of the walls rise into the attic. Roof with an arched-brace collar truss and associated collar-purlin, as at No.63 Whiting Street (qv). (BOE: Pevsner N: Radcliffe E: Suffolk: London: 1974-: 149).

Listing NGR: TL8529264173