3, Market Street

No. 3 Market Street, Tavistock

A house with shop on the east side of Market Street. The left-hand section was originally part of No. 4. The building dates from the 16th century with early 17th-century additions; it was altered in the late 17th or early 18th century, and again in the early 19th century.

The front is timber-framed and covered with slate-hanging, with a slate roof and a small rendered chimney to the left of the ridge. The building is 3 storeys with a garret, and measures 2 windows wide, with 1 window visible on the exposed side-wall to the right.

The ground storey has a slightly projecting shop front of late 19th or early 20th-century date, which overlaps with the shop front of No. 2. This shop front features thin fluted attached columns on either side of the entrance, and an entablature with a fluted band at the top of the frieze and a moulded and reeded cornice, returned around the right side-wall. The original shop front finished at a stone centre-wall and was later extended to the left without the entablature.

The upper storeys are hung with deep, broad slates, with vertical joints covered by narrow slates forming long strips from the shop front to the eaves. Flush-framed windows with 8-paned sashes light the upper floors. At the top is a plank band, 2 planks high, probably replacing an earlier eaves-cornice.

The interior contains several features of historic interest. At the front of the ground storey on the right-hand side is an ovolo-moulded wooden post set against the stone centre-wall and tenoned at the top into a mutilated ovolo-moulded beam spanning the whole front. The post has a mortice for a horizontal timber, and the beam has the blocked mortice of a former post, suggesting a former window about 1.17 metres wide. Above the beam are original plain waney joists projecting to form a jetty of approximately 30 centimetres. These did not carry the upper-floor structure; instead it rested on a second beam immediately in front of them, supported at the left-hand end by a free-standing post. In the 19th century, a new front was added enclosing the earlier posts and jetty within the shop.

The upper floor has a fireplace with chamfered monolithic granite jambs and lintel, the whole disguised by a wooden bolection-moulded chimneypiece. The room has a small moulded plaster cornice, breaking forward above the left end of the chimney breast as if over a pilaster. At the rear is a wooden open-well staircase of late 17th or early 18th-century date, rising to the garret. It must originally have descended to the ground storey. It has closed moulded strings, symmetrical turned balusters, square newels with flat moulded caps, and a moulded hand rail with a slightly pointed top. Some balusters have been replaced either with thick square ones or turned ones of 17th-century design.

The left-hand section, originally part of No. 4, has in the rear of the ground storey a chamfered half-beam with lodged joists along the stone centre-wall. At the front it is jettied out over what appears to be the dressed stone jamb of the original front door. Butting against this is a later beam arrangement, including the chamfered and stopped joist-ends of a former jetty. Upon these rests a hollow and bead-moulded beam with chamfered studs rising from it into the upper storey. These studs, and the beams above and below them, are grooved front and back, with the front grooves carrying the remains of wooden panels. At the rear of the upper floor is the end of a ceiling-beam moulded with a half-round and 2 hollows, probably of early or mid-16th-century date; it protrudes through the party-wall into No. 4 without stops. The roof over this section has not been converted into a garret; the chimney retains a weathering, suggesting the building has been heightened by a storey.