28 And 28A, Abbeygate Street

Two shops with storage rooms above, formerly a house and shop, dating from the early 16th and early 17th centuries. The building is timber-framed and roughcast with twin gables to the street, finished with plain late 20th-century bargeboards and plain tiles.

The exterior presents three storeys and a cellar to the front, and three storeys with an attic to the rear. Both upper storeys have two windows each: sashes with a single vertical glazing-bar to the lights in cased frames. The ground floor has two 20th-century shop fronts.

The cellar is not readily accessible. The shop interiors have been fully modernised. The upper storeys are all approached from number 28A. The building comprises two parallel ranges at right angles to the street, each containing two rooms to a storey and an internal chimney-stack.

The first-storey front rooms originally featured oriel windows flanked by smaller side windows, which still retain moulded mullions. Recent wallpaper stripping has uncovered extensive remains of early 17th-century painted decoration in both first-storey front rooms and the front attic room, originally covering the whole walls. The decoration includes intersecting repetitive strapwork-type designs containing formalised flowers and foliage. In the east room, fragments of a frieze display a large leaf pattern. The colours—mainly green, red and white on a black background—remain very strong, probably because they were covered at an early stage. In the west room, the remains of a late 17th-century plaster frieze with raised ornate panels lie over the paintings, indicating a fairly rapid change in decorative style.

On the first storey, the main components of the frame are visible along the east wall, with tension braces and a central post with arched braces; the decoration covers all these timbers and the wall behind them, which forms the outer surface of the west wall of number 29.

To the rear of the east chimney-stack is a small much-altered room. To the rear of the western stack is a small room with an unusual heavily-moulded late 15th or early 16th-century ceiling in which the main cross-beams are set diagonally; the plaster between features added decoration of around 1600 with Tudor roses and acanthus leaves in relief.

On the top storey, some exposed studding and a braced central post support the valley of the front gables. Both halves of the attic originally formed one large room, also decorated in a similar but rougher style than the two rooms below, with designs in black and white on a pink background, more fragmentary than on the first storey. In the eastern half, a small brick fireplace with rounded back and timber lintel has remains of old render over the bricks, coloured pink and lined to simulate stone. Below the pink colouring is an older grey surface with the bricks penny struck. In the western half, an early 19th-century raised cast-iron grate with fluted decoration was inserted when the attic was divided into two rooms.

The rear attic on the west has a tie-beam cut to allow access, and the ceiling of the top-storey room, a later insertion, is set below wallplate level in the attic, leaving a short section of heavy studding visible along the side walls. The roof is a crown-post roof, the post within the partition wall braced to the collar-purlin; collars and rafters are concealed. A small-paned sash window is set above the tie-beam in the rear gable, and in the soffit below the tie-beam is the rebate for an original window.