46, High Street

46 High Street is a former hall house dating from the 15th or early 16th century. It represents a survival from the Saxon town's original burgage plot layout, and apparently retains the full length of its original plot to the rear of the house.

The house is built of rubble stone, rendered and painted, beneath a Cotswold stone tile roof with a stone rubble stack. The gable end has been rebuilt above the eaves line in modern brick. At least the first floor, and possibly the entire building, is framed in timber behind the stone rubble cladding, partly visible in the interior.

The plan is L-shaped. The original main range, formerly a cross-passage house, faces the road. A later extension, which replaces a longer and more substantial cross wing, runs westwards from the rear.

The main range comprises two storeys and three bays with a roughly central entrance doorway housing a wide 18th-century door with two small glazed panels. There are two 19th-century three-light timber casement windows to the first floor. To the south, the ground floor has a canted bay with multi-paned fixed windows. To the north, there is a smaller rectangular bay with timber casement windows. To the rear, truncated remains of a two-storey gabled cross wing survive at the north end; a single-storey lean-to extension which replaced it in the early 20th century remains in place. A further lean-to extension, probably dating from the 19th century, runs across the rear of the main range. All rear windows are uPVC replacements, with the first-floor window of the main range in an enlarged opening.

The interior has a single room either side of the cross passage. The southern room, formerly the service room, has an exposed chamfered and stepped stopped ceiling beam and plain wall plate to the south wall. The northern room, formerly the open hall, has a ceiling inserted in the 17th century featuring an exposed beam and ceiling joists with chamfers and stepped runout stops. A large fireplace with segmental arched beam is set in a massive stone stack rising through the house. A winder stair, probably inserted at the same time as the ceiling and stack, occupies the alcove to the east of the chimney stack. The first-floor southern room, formerly the solar, has some exposed timber framing. Above the former cross passage, which must therefore have been open to the roof, is a two-light timber window with trefoil heads. The roof trusses spring from exposed wall posts in the first floor.

The attic retains the original roof structure largely unaltered: two mid-trusses, end trusses, single threaded purlins and a diagonally set ridge-purlin. The more northerly mid-truss is an open truss with a chamfered collar and arch braces; the remaining trusses have cambered collars and tie beams, with evidence of windbraces in the form of mortices, though most have been lost apart from one at the rear of the stack. In the gable end is a small two-light timber window with ogee mullions. Timbers in the northern and central bays show obvious smoke-blackening from the period when the hall was open to the roof.

Stone boundary markers at the side and rear of the plot apparently accord with the layout of the original Saxon burgage plot.

The building was constructed in the 15th or 16th century as a three-bay hall house range facing the street. A substantial two-storey rear wing, probably for a kitchen, was added to the north in the 17th century, with some internal alterations at the same time. By 1837, when the tithe map was drawn up, the house consisted of these two ranges. In the later 19th century, alterations to the front included the addition of bay windows to the ground floor. The rear range was removed in the early 20th century and replaced with a single-storey lean-to extension; a further lean-to extension along the width of the rear was added in the later 19th century. The house has apparently remained in use as a single dwelling throughout its life, though the bays to the front may have served as shop windows.