31, High Street

This is a mid to late 19th-century shop with living accommodation above, built in a Gothick style. The building is constructed of yellow brick with stone, red, and black brick dressings, and has a roof that is not visible from the street. A red brick chimney is located on the left side wall.

The exterior is four storeys high and three windows wide, with the central window being narrower than the others. The shopfront, likely a late 19th-century addition, features wooden pilasters, with a pair of small bulbous Ionic columns on top of the left-hand one. Above the columns is an entablature incorporating a blindcase, and a display window with slender shafts and enriched scrolled capitals. A glazed shop door to the right has shaped panels and a scrolled pediment set against a patterned fanlight. A fringe of scrollwork runs across the shopfront beneath the entablature. Pilaster strips flank the upper storeys, with bands of red and black brick at each floor level, accompanied by sunk red brick panels between and alongside the windows. The outer windows have 4-centred arches of red and black brick and stone, the central windows being round-arched. Moulded stone impost bands are present. All windows have plain sashes, and a modillioned eaves cornice tops the building.

The interior of the shop has a ceiling made of moulded papier-mâché. A painted-over plate on the reveal of the house entrance, to the left of the shopfront, bears the name of Allen T Hussell, an architect and surveyor, who was born in Ilfracombe in 1870. He was articled to WH Gould and established his own practice in the late 1890s. He produced a book, North Devon Churches, in 1909 and wrote a series of articles about Ilfracombe’s architecture for the Ilfracombe Chronicle between May and September 1937. He was also a composer of popular songs and a pianist. The building is part of a group of mostly later 19th-century commercial buildings, notable for their ambitious scale within a town of this size.