31, High Street

SS5147 853-1/6/68

ILFRACOMBE HIGH STREET (North side) No.31

GV II

Shop with living accommodation above. Mid to late C19. Gothick design. MATERIALS: yellow brick with dressings of stone, red and black brick. Roof not visible from street. Red brick chimney on left side wall. EXTERIOR: 4 storeys. 3-windows-wide, the middle window narrower than the rest. Good shopfront, probably a late C19 insertion. Flanking wooden pilasters, the left-hand one with a pair of small bulbous Ionic columns on top; entablature above with blindcase incorporated. Display window has slender shafts with enriched scrolled capitals. Glazed shop door to right with shaped panels; scrolled pediment above set against the base of a patterned fanlight. Across the whole shopfront, beneath the entablature, is a fringe of scrollwork. Upper storeys flanked by pilaster strips; bands of red and black brick at each floor level, sunk red brick panels between and at either side of the windows. Outer windows have 4-centred arches of red and black brick and stone, the middle windows similar but round-arched. Moulded stone impost-bands. All windows have plain sashes. Modillioned eaves-cornice. INTERIOR not inspected, except that the shop has a ceiling of moulded papier-mache. On the reveal of the house entrance, to the left of the shopfront, is a painted-over plate with the name of Allen T Hussell, architect and surveyor. HISTORY: Hussell was a native of Ilfracombe (b.1870); he was articled to WH Gould and had his own practice from the late 1890s. In 1909 he published a book, North Devon Churches, and wrote a series of articles on Ilfracombe architecture in the Ilfracombe Chronicle, May-Sept. 1937. He was also a composer of popular songs, especially just after the First World War, and a pianist. In 1912 he was engaged to play on a cruise ship to the Amazon. His architectural works included Westway (1913) at the entrance to Torrs Park and, in the 1890s, some of the houses in Broad Park Avenue. Part of a good roup of mostly later C19 commercial architecture of a remarkably ambitious scale for a town of this size. (Lamplugh L: Ilfracombe, 1984: 7; 125-7; Transactions of the Devonshire Association: 1946-: 45; Ilfracombe Chronicle, 28.5.1937: 3, 8; Devon Record Office: Devon Record Office: R2458 add. No 1540; Ilfracombe Local Board of Health Planning File: North Devon DC Planning Department: Ilfracombe Local Board of Health Planning File: (on microfilm)).

Listing NGR: SS5178147605