Harpers Music Room

Harpers Music Room is an early 16th-century building, originally two houses with shops, now combined into one with a shop on the ground floor and offices above. It was altered in the mid-19th century. The building has a timber-frame construction, with exposed framing along Lower Baxter Street and a white brick front with a parapet and quadrant corner facing Abbeygate Street. It features plaintiled roofs and a moulded cornice to the parapet.

The Abbeygate Street frontage is three stories high, with two stories and attics to the rear. It has three small-paned sash windows on each upper floor, set in deep reveals with stucco architraves. A centre bay slightly projects and has a plain flat pilaster at each end. The shop front has a dentil cornice to the wooden fascia and three small flat wooden pilasters with carved Ionic capitals dividing the windows. The Lower Baxter Street frontage is in four bays, three of which have exposed framing to the upper storey, supported by a moulded and castellated bressumer; the lower part is rendered. There are three inserted small-paned sash windows on the upper storey, and three blocked 16th-century mullioned windows, one of three lights and the others smaller within larger openings. Peg-holes and replacement studding suggest the frontage originally had windows along the entire upper storey.

Inside, one ground-floor bay displays massive plain joists forming the jetty in the ceiling. A section of the upper storey, accessible from the shop, shows some original components, including a tie-beam with a small solid bracket. The upper storey is also accessed from No. 7 Lower Baxter Street. The narrow range to Abbeygate Street has been raised, and the principal upper room has a small 19th-century foliated plaster cornice, but no earlier features are exposed. In the Lower Baxter Street range, a bracket for a boxed-in collar purlin indicates a former crown-post roof.