58 High Street

Bank, 1866, to designs by Frederick Chancellor. The upper floors were converted to flats in 2016.

MATERIALS: red brick with Bath stone dressings; the roof is slate.

PLAN: the principal range is roughly rectangular in plan and faces south onto Tenterden High Street. The roof has a shallow pitch, is hipped and has tall end stacks. To the rear is a long, narrow three-storey range. A single-storey, flat-roofed extension was added to the rear range in about 1970; this extension is excluded from the listing.

The ground floor and basement are in commercial use, the plan appearing to have been extensively reordered it the C20. The upper floors are self-contained flats.

EXTERIOR: the building is in an Italianate palazzo style with five regular bays over three diminishing storeys raised on a brick plinth. At the eaves is a deep stone bracketed cornice which returns to the sides and rear of the building.

Ground and first floor window openings have distinctive rubbed red brick arches with a segmental intrados and pointed segmental extrados. The ground floor arches have a carved console keystone and rest on carved stone piers with pairs of pilasters with foliate capitals. The openings are identical, bar that to the far left being the principal entrance: a six-panel double door moved from its original location in the central bay. The central bay is now a window with one-over-one sliding sash window to match the other three. Above is a stone cornice and fascia.

First and second floors are divided by a stone string course and brick modillion band; windows are two-over-two sliding sashes, recessed within stone architraves with spiral ribbon and rope edge mouldings.

The end stacks, though now reduced in height and having lost their flared coping stones, are prominent features of the roof form.

INTERIOR: the basement retains fragmentary C19 features, such as the strong room door and square iron rod balusters to the basement stair. Otherwise, the visible interior fabric of the bank is of late-C20 or early C21 date.

Based on record photographs, the upper floors are not believed to retain any historic features of note.