35, High Street

House at 35 High Street

This is an early 18th-century house, now with a modern ground-floor shop and rear extension, situated on High Street in Chatham. The building is brick, coated in pebbledash over which roughcast render has been applied and marked out with quoins. The roof is covered with modern concrete tiles.

The house has an unusual architectural history and plan form. It was built against the side of an earlier building, No. 33 High Street (now demolished), and the east wall of that earlier structure is embedded in the west flank wall of No. 35. This constraint directly shaped the building's curious L-shaped roof plan, with the front part parallel to the street and a cat-slide to the rear. The thickness of the west flank wall increases towards the rear, making the rear rooms narrower than the front. Angled intrusions on the inner wall of each room, around which panelling and cornices continue where they survive, indicate that the rooms were built around an existing projection on the east wall of the earlier building, probably a chimneystack.

The house comprises three storeys over a basement. It contains a front and rear room with a stair compartment against the east party wall between them. This stair arrangement survives at basement, first and second floor levels but is much altered at ground floor. A landing lobby alongside the stair separates the front and rear rooms at first and second floors. The plan appears to be a hybrid or transitional design: the stair position reflects common 17th-century domestic town-house practice surviving outside London, but the chimney breast is positioned on the flank wall rather than centrally alongside the stair, which is the conventional 18th-century arrangement. This unconventional positioning may have been pragmatically dictated by the house's narrowing width at that point.

The façade comprises two bays with segmental arched windows and a deep moulded timber eaves cornice. A lead rainwater hopper-head is present. The rear roof slope has a modern gabled dormer. The modern shop front and entrance door are not of special architectural interest.

Internally, the ground-floor shop interior contains no visible features of interest. A winding stair from basement to ground and from first to second floors retains a closed string, turned balusters and newel posts, and a heavy moulded handrail. The first-floor front room features full-height timber wall panelling with a small moulded timber cornice (the dado rail is missing). Panelling in the north-east corner is missing where a later stair was inserted. The original fire surround and grate have been removed, though a cupboard survives to the left of the fireplace. The landing lobby between the two rooms has a panelled cupboard to the left, mirroring the stair compartment to the right, though the side wall to the rear room is now missing. A triple-light fanlight survives over the door between the landing and rear room. Two-panelled doors and some panelling to the inner stair compartment also remain. The second floor retains the essential plan form, though a partition has been inserted into the front room. The basement rear room and stair compartment retain 18th-century panelling, unusually for a basement room, with mouldings that may be later alterations. The cupboard and door architraves appear to be 19th-century work. A chimneybreast on the east wall has cupboards to either side, though the chimneybreast itself has been removed at upper levels.

The single-storey rear extension is not of special architectural interest.

Historically, the house dates stylistically from the early 18th century and exemplifies Chatham's development during the 17th and 18th centuries, following the establishment of the Royal Dockyard in the 16th century near the ancient settlement to the north-east of the present town centre. The town expanded south-westwards towards Rochester, developing around the old London to Canterbury Road (Watling Street), of which Rochester and Chatham High Streets form part.