No 24 Royal Hill

House, now with ground floor shop, at 24 Royal Hill. Early 18th century, with 19th and 20th century alterations. Brick walls laid to Flemish Bond with tiled gambrel roof.

The building follows a central chimneystack plan type with a narrow urban form, one room wide and two rooms deep, characteristic of early 18th-century London artisan housing. A 19th-century wash-house addition extends to the rear. The plan bears direct resemblance to Joseph Moxon's published 1704 design, and this is the smallest known example of that type.

The ground floor displays a 20th-century shop front below a pair of tall windows with segmental heads and sashes in shallow reveals; the lower 4-pane sashes may be original. A central dormer projects from the gambrel roof, with a chimney rising to the rear of the roof ridge. The rear was rebuilt in brick during the 19th century with a central sash to both floors and a single-storey 19th-century extension.

Internally, the ground floor front room has been refitted for shop use in the 20th century, but retains the thin stud-and-brace partition that originally separated this house from its pair (exposed in 2004), the brick mass of the chimneystack with partial cupboards to the left, and a single-newel timber winder stair to the right. A passage at the far right leads to a smaller rear room containing a 19th-century cast-iron fireplace and an architrave to a former cupboard. A timber winder stair rises to the first floor, which features a plain panelled partition with a 4-panel door to the front room. This room also has the exposed partition to the former pair, a cupboard with doors removed, a chimneystack with cast-iron grate, and a plain panelled partition with stair access. A cornice that was present in 1997 has since been removed from this room. A 4-panel door opens to a smaller rear room with a cupboard fitted with a 2-panel door, a mid-20th-century fireplace, and an exposed stud partition. The winder stair continues to a heated garret with original roof structure, formerly plastered, with some later reinforcements.

Built in the early 18th century at the outer edges of the rapidly expanding maritime community of Greenwich, 24 Royal Hill originally occupied what was then quite rural ground. The building was constructed as part of a pair, divided only by a timber stud partition, though the southern house has since been rebuilt. It may have always had a shop on the ground floor, and certainly did so from the 19th century onwards. The original cellar has been infilled.

This house represents a small urban dwelling of early 18th-century date with central chimneystack plan, a layout that was popular in late 17th-century London and continued in lower-status houses into the early 18th century. Housing of this scale, status and date survives in small numbers; the modesty of such buildings and the disguising effects of later alterations often precluded their listing despite their early date. As the Royal Commission report describes it, 24 Royal Hill is an 'exceptionally rare witness to what much of the townscape of the metropolis may have comprised'.