Goose Green Cottage

Goose Green Cottage is a late 16th-century timber-framed house that has undergone several phases of alteration. The main modifications include encasing the original frame in brick in 1713, remodelling in the 1930s, and additions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Construction and Materials

The building has an oak box-frame construction encased in red brick laid in Stretcher, Flemish and English bonds. The roofs are hipped and tiled.

Plan and Layout

The house has a rectangular plan running west to east, with its entrance elevation facing south onto Vicarage Road. It is two storeys high under a hipped tiled roof. The original house followed a lobby-entry plan—long and narrow, comprising three-and-a-half bays and one room wide. Later extensions added further end bays, a service range to the north, a rear north-east wing, a dining room extension to the south, and a conservatory to the west.

The entrance hall is positioned off-centre to the east. A west-east corridor with a central timber-framed partition wall provides access to the lounge, dining room and study in the southern part of the house, with service areas—the kitchen and utility room—to the north-west and a playroom to the north-east. On the first floor, a west-east corridor along the northern side of the house gives access to four bedrooms and a bathroom arranged to its south.

Exterior

The entrance elevation to the south has five-and-a-half bays, with the half-bay housing the original chimney stack. The westernmost bay is a post-1713 addition, evidenced by a straight joint in the exterior brickwork. The central two-storey extension dates from the 1930s and has a hipped roof echoing the main house in fabric, form and detailing. Most windows are 20th-century timber mullions with leaded lights. Tile detailing decorates the window hoods, and there are tile cills. The main entrance lies to the east of the 1930s extension and has a 20th-century plank door with flanking casements, all under a shallow segmental arch. A brick string course separates the ground and first floors. The elevation is decorated with vitrified blue brickwork at first-floor level giving the date of the brick refronting as 1713. There is an off-centre clustered chimney stack, plus end stacks to the west and east.

The north garden front, also in brick, is dominated by a catslide tiled roof with two tile-hung gabled roof dormers at first-floor level. A late 20th-century conservatory stands to the west (which is not of special interest) and a gabled three-storey cross-wing to the east; the gable of the latter has modern brickwork indicating repair or remodelling. Windows are timber mullions with leaded lights as on the south front. The brickwork to this elevation is much patched, showing evidence of numerous interventions and repairs.

Interior

Timber box-framing is exposed throughout, mainly in large to medium-sized pegged panels using substantial timbers. There are carpenters' marks and some diagonal bracing to the frame of the first-floor corridor. Most panels have plastered infill, but brick nogging is also used, for instance in the kitchen south wall. Substantial chamfered beams feature in the lounge, dining room and study. The lounge and dining room are divided by the large original chimney stack. Both fireplaces are built with narrow bricks and are substantial: the lounge fireplace has a replaced bressumer, and the dining-room fireplace has a brick basket arch. There is evidence of previous modifications, including former external doors (now blocked) to the lounge west wall, south of the chimney stack, the former north external wall (now the north wall of the entrance hall), and the east end wall. Although the study and second bedroom both have a timber-framed west wall, and the south wall of the playroom is also timber-framed, there is no frame visible further east, suggesting that the eastern bay of the house is an addition. However, there is a chamfered cross beam to the study. The main staircase rises from the entrance hall; it is in oak and Art Deco in style. A secondary modern staircase leads to the playroom.

Bedrooms 1 and 4 share the same original chimney stack, with a large fireplace to bedroom 1 built in narrow bricks, though the original large opening has been reduced in size and a small 1930s brick fireplace inserted. Further small brick 1930s fireplaces can be found in bedrooms 2 and 3 and in the study.

The roof space was only partially inspected, but the eastern end has less substantial timbers than the remainder of the house, suggesting an addition of 18th- or early 19th-century date. 20th-century replacement of some rafters and repairs are evident.

History

Although there are no records of its construction, Goose Green Cottage can be dated to the second half of the 16th century on architectural grounds: large timber-frame panels of this type are not generally found after the very early 17th century, but the central stack is a feature most commonly found after about 1550. The house does not appear to be mentioned in a 1567 document known as The Crondall Customary, which lists the one hundred or so dwellings in Yateley Tithing at that time.

In the early 18th century the house was refronted in brick, the date of which—1713—is picked out in vitrified blue brick on the principal south elevation.

Architectural evidence suggests that both the western and eastern bays are additions. The western bay was built after the 1713 refronting, possibly associated with the Dingle family who bought the house in 1753. The date of the eastern bay is more difficult to determine, as there is no indication of a break in the brickwork of the south elevation (although it has clearly been reworked at some time). Possibly, therefore, the eastern bay is of pre-1713 date, although the roof appears to be later: perhaps an 18th- or early 19th-century remodelling of an earlier 17th-century bay. The historic plan was a three-and-a-half bay, lobby-entry house. The three historic bays are now in use as the easternmost half of the lounge, the northern part of the dining room, and the entrance hall, with the rear wall demarked by the current corridor partition wall. The main entrance would historically have opened against the chimney stack which forms the half-bay. Thus bedrooms 1 and 4 are within the original envelope, but bedrooms 2 and 3 are within later extensions. The northern accommodation has clearly been modified and added to, not least with the addition of a cross-wing to the north-east. The higher-status end of the late 16th-century house, the hall, was to the west, and the 'low' end was to the east, as can be demonstrated by comparing the quality of the chamfered beam to the lounge with the simpler example to the dining room to its east.

Occupants of the cottage are recorded in the Crondall Court Books of Admissions and Surrenders between 1752 and 1878. Licensing records from the 1790s suggest that it was then a public house. The house is shown on the tithe map of 1844 as a single dwelling, but by the time of the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1871 it is divided into four. Whether this represents four individual cottages or a pair of cottages with attached outhouses to the west and east cannot be determined. Subsequent Ordnance Survey maps of 1896 and 1911 show the building divided into two L-shaped cottages. In the early 20th century the house was, in part, a bakery. The easternmost half is shown with a projecting shopfront and 'Hovis' sign on the roof in a photograph of about 1910, and the Land Tax Assessment of 1910 describes a timber and iron shopfront. One W B Tice ran the shop and held the lease between 1899 and 1925. By the 1930s it was again a single dwelling and is shown as such on the 1932 Ordnance Survey map. To this date can be attributed the central southern dining room extension, the small brick fireplaces and the Art Deco main staircase. The house was owned by the Chenevix-Trench family between 1930 and 1933, who may well have been responsible for this remodelling.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries further modifications have included the replacement of the battens and felt to the roof and its re-tiling (reusing the historic tiles), modifications to the utility area (centre rear, of 2002), and the erection of a conservatory to the west in 2006 (also not of special interest).