Former County Court with Gatepiers Attached is a Grade II listed building in the Medway local planning authority area, England. First listed on 2 December 1991. Court house.

Former County Court with Gatepiers Attached

WRENN ID
high-wicket-nettle
Grade
II
Local Planning Authority
Medway
Constituency
Rochester and Strood MP: Lauren Edwards (Lab)
Country
England
Date first listed
2 December 1991
Type
Court house
Address
Former County Court with Gatepiers Attached, High Street
OS grid reference
TQ 746 681
Coordinates
51.38551, 0.50896
Source
Historic England listing

Also on this page: flood risk · radon risk · weather exposure · detailed attributes ↓

Description

The former County Court, dated 1862, is located on Rochester High Street. This building features Flemish bond red brick, with gault and black brick and stone dressings, topped with Welsh slate hipped roofs that have bargeboarded gablets. Designed in the High Victorian polychrome Gothic style, it has a double pile plan with offices in the street-side block and a first-floor courtroom in the taller rear block, aligned east-west. The building stands two storeys high and has a regular five-window range facing the High Street. All windows consist of two lights, with stone mullions and surrounds; the first-floor windows have flat arches, while the ground-floor windows have cambered brick arches, and the lights feature moulded shouldered arches. The windows are fitted with four-pane horned sashes.

To the right, there is a doorway with a stone architrave that has a shouldered head and a tracery fanlight beneath a two-centered brick arch. The building displays gault and black brick banding at the first-floor and eaves levels, along with a corbelled stone eaves cornice. A porch under the entrance tower, which has two stages and a rectangular plan, features three ground-floor stilted cambered arches of two orders with deeply cut stone capitals. The left arch has a three-light window, while the entrance arches to the north and south have a royal coat-of-arms above the south entrance. The upper stage has decorated style two-light windows and bracketted eaves. The leaded spire has a broach base and a saddle-back apex with cresting and a weather-vane. There is polychrome banding at the line of springers to the arches and at the eaves.

At the front, there are two attached gatepiers, although the gates have been replaced. The rear courtroom range features two-light decorated style tracery windows on the first floor. The building also has cast-iron rainwater goods and two prominent end stacks on the rear range, along with a truncated ridge stack at the front. The interior has not been inspected.

Local climate

Former County Court with Gatepiers Attached sits in a drier-than-average part of the UK, with an average of 720 mm of rain a year. This makes it drier than 84% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is lower than that of 74% of listed buildings.

It experiences an average of 23 freeze-thaw cycles a year, fewer than 76% of listed buildings. Of these, 11 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.

Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.

More on this building

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