New Hall New Hall Cottage The Expenditors House

This is a late 16th-century house and former court room, with alterations from the 19th century. It is timber framed and situated on High Street in Dymchurch. The north elevation, facing New Hall Close, has a ground floor clad in 19th-century chequered red and grey brick and a first floor in alternating bands of plain and fishscale tiles. The right-hand bay of the first floor has been rebuilt in brick. The roof is tiled, hipped, with a lower ridge to the right and a higher ridge to the left. Brick ridge stacks are located towards the right end of the recess and at the gable end to the right. Irregularly spaced windows include fixed lights with glazing bars in the left projection, a tripartite sash window in the centre of the recess, and a 12-pane glazing bar sash in the right projection. The recessed section has two ground-floor windows in open boxes, one narrow beside the front door, and a 16-pane glazing bar sash with rendered voussoirs to the right. A six-panel door with fluted Doric pilasters and a moulded triangular pediment is located towards the left end of the recess. A two-storey house, likely from the early 19th century, adjoins the right, set back and with a tile-hung right end. A stack sits towards the right side. The High Street elevation is brick faced with dentilled eaves and rendered quoins. A steeply pitched hipped roof has a central brick ridge stack. The fenestration includes 12-pane glazing bar sashes in open boxes to the right of the stack (serving the Court Room), and a single sash on each side of a short, 19th-century brick wing to the left of the stack. All windows have segmental heads. A rendered return wing to the left features four glazing bar sashes. The first-floor Court Room, in the north-east corner, consists of two timber-framed bays running north-south, with staggered butt-side purlins and scowled posts with moulded brackets. Original court room benches and tables, some fixed, remain. The room below the Court Room has moulded beams and a dragon beam, accessible by a chamfered doorway from a timber-framed passage which leads, via a moulded doorway, from the entrance hall. The interior was only partly inspected. The building was constructed on the site of one burnt down around 1580. The site served as the centre of Romney Marsh administration until the Corporation relinquished its powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was used as a gaol until 1866. A 20th-century brick addition to the left bay is not included in the listing.