4 Hammond Hill

4 Hammond Hill

House, built around 1654, with a refronted facade and alterations from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

The building is constructed of brick and timber, now faced with painted roughcast render and clay tile roof. It occupies a rectangular plot facing east onto Hammond Hill, which connects Chatham High Street to the north with New Road to the south.

The building is double-pile in plan with parallel pitched roofs behind a front parapet. The three-bay front range is the larger element: deeper and taller than the rear, containing attic rooms and a cellar. Gable-end stacks stand to north and south (the northern stack lost above roof level). The rear range may originally have been single-storey, perhaps under a catslide roof, before being raised later to form a full first floor.

A central passage with dog-leg stair bisects the loosely symmetrical plan from front to back. On either side of the passage sit a large principal room to the front and a smaller room behind. The first and attic floors each have a small central room over the passage.

To the rear are numerous additions of various dates. The most substantial is a range projecting at right-angles westward along the southern boundary, partly two-storied with a gabled mansard roof and partly single-storied with a mono-pitch roof and large chimney stack. Although altered, this may originally be the kitchen and wash house shown on the 1799 lease plan, possibly added by John Peck in 1796. A brick porch around the rear door, supporting a central projecting first-floor WC, was in place by 1864 (the survey date of the 1866 town plan map). A single-storey addition along the northern boundary, roughly in the position of a laundry range depicted in 1799 but lost by the mid-19th century, appears to be of late 20th-century date.

The exterior presents a double-fronted elevation with the attic storey treated as a full second floor. Three-storey canted bay windows flank a central Tuscan porch, beneath which is a half-glazed door in an arched opening with panelled reveals. The windows, recorded in the 1996 List entry as plate glass sashes, are now uPVC replacements as of 2024. The brickwork is faced in roughcast render with storey bands. The rendering was applied sometime after 1943 (based on a photograph from that autumn), and beneath it remains visible a small name plaque reading "CAMDEN HOUSE" on the upper left-hand side of the elevation.

The north flank elevation shows a mix of early and later red brick with first and second floor plat bands.

The rear elevation is rendered, with the ground floor largely screened by later additions. The first floor is distinctive for its five-bay arrangement with tall, narrow window openings, now with later timber casements, and the gabled stair tower rising over the central bay. The rear roof slope of the front range has gabled dormers, now blind.

Internally, the building contains fabric diagnostic of its mid-17th-century origins alongside notable joinery, features and fittings from later periods.

Each of the two principal ground floor rooms has a large ceiling beam running north to south, both showing evidence of what would have been substantial hearth openings, now narrowed or blocked.

The right-hand room is more elaborate decoratively. Its beam is moulded and panelled, and a modillion cornice runs around three sides. The room also contains one of the house's striking features: a large Jacobean chimneypiece with tapered pilasters carrying a deep ovolo mantleshelf and overmantle with smaller tapered pilasters, perspectival niche motifs and small square-eared panels. The wide arched opening to the back room has reveals painted with sprays of flowers and foliage, probably dating to the 19th century.

Within the central passage, immediately to the left of the front door, evidence survives of an early blocked doorway. The dog-leg stair to the rear is possibly of early 18th-century date, featuring a cut string and flat scrolled brackets, with turned balusters, four of which form the newel. The stair continues to the attic level, where the balusters are of simpler columnar design.

Further features of 17th, 18th and 19th-century date include chimneypieces, dado panelling, moulded overmantle panels, hobgrates, sections of modillion cornice, cupboard doors, ironmongery and wooden pegs. More early fabric of this type may survive behind later finishes. Exposed structural timber on the upper floors includes stop-chamfered beams in the first-floor rooms to the front.