18 Hill Street

18 Hill Street is a grade II listed building comprising a former house of late 18th-century date, previously one of a pair of dwellings, with an attached former warehouse built around the mid-19th century. Later additions and alterations have been made, and a separate late-20th-century building to the rear (20 Hill Street) is not included in the listing.

The house is built in header bond brickwork with a left-hand ridge chimney stack and a tiled 18th-century valley mansard roof. The warehouse has stretcher bond brickwork and a gabled slate roof. The building is rectangular in plan, comprising the former double-depth house of two bays and the adjacent former warehouse.

The house has two storeys and an attic. The warehouse comprises a single bay of two storeys, a three-storey gabled section, and a single-storey three-bay section. The two right-hand bays of the original house have corbelled eaves which extend across the lower right-hand bay of the former warehouse, an early-20th-century infill marked by a vertical joint in the brickwork and a slight change in the angle of the elevation.

The house features a round-arched doorway with a four-panel door and an inserted shallow bay window to the ground floor, and two first-floor sash windows with cambered keyed heads. The flat-arched dormer window is a two-light casement. The infill bay has a wider round-arched doorway, partly infilled with brick and containing an inserted door, and a first-floor window matching those in the house.

The three-storey gabled section of the warehouse is symmetrical, with wide central openings flanked by small round-arched windows on each floor. The ground-floor opening is an entrance with double doors, and there are taking-in doors to the openings above. Diaper pattern brickwork appears in the gable.

The single-storey section to the left has a parapet with a raised and curved open pediment to the centre, carried on short pilasters rising from a string course of shaped bricks and a moulded stone coping. A central segmental-arched multi-paned window sits under a lintel of header bricks with a small blank panel above. Either side of the window is a tall opening with incised voussoirs and cambered keyed segmental heads, containing late-20th-century paired square lights with decorative glazing bars and four half-glazed false doors; the central two in the right-hand opening have been replaced with a matching pair of doors, these replacements for full-height sliding doors.

The left (south-west) return has two brick stepped buttresses and is blind. The right return has late-20th-century three-over-six pane sashes to the ground and first floors and a six-over-six-pane sash to the upper floor.

The rear elevation of the former house has three ground-floor sash windows, two at first floor, and an attic window of two lights. The north-west return breaks forward of the former warehouse and has been rebuilt in brown brick. The rear of the warehouse has also been rebuilt.

The interiors have been refurbished in the 20th and 21st centuries with modern finishes and fittings. A spine corridor provides access to various ground-floor rooms. The first floor is accessed from a modern staircase in 20 Hill Street to the rear, and the upper floor is approached via a straight flight stair in the former house. A mezzanine floor has been created in the south-west end of the building, above which is a steel standard fink truss roof.