Nailsworth Quaker Meeting House and attached boundary walls and gateway

Nailsworth Quaker Meeting House and attached boundary walls and gateway

A late 17th-century Quaker Meeting House, registered in 1689, built in Cotswold vernacular style.

The building is constructed from local rubble limestone with a Cotswold stone slate roof. Rainwater goods are cast aluminium, with one lead hopper dated 2010.

The building is rectangular in plan, orientated roughly east-west, with a larger meeting room to the east and a smaller room to the west now used as a library. A small lean-to extension projects from the western end. The meeting house is attached to an earlier, mid-17th-century house at its south-western corner, forming a right-angled-plan; this adjacent building (1 and 2 Quakers Close) is separately listed at Grade II.

The meeting house is a domestic-scale, mainly high single-storey building of the later 17th century, with chamfered stone-mullioned windows with hood moulds and large quoins. It appears to incorporate elements from an earlier building, which may have formed part of the adjacent house; the junction of the two phases is visible in a change in roof pitch to the main south elevation. This elevation has a wide, round-arched central doorway with a half-round stone step, fitted with later 20th-century boarded doors. The door surround is stop-chamfered with a central keystone and spandrels framed by a square hood mould with large panelled diagonal label stops. To the left of the door, straddling the earlier building and the meeting house addition, is a small two-light mullioned window with diamond-leaded iron casements and stone hood mould. Above this, to the left, a similar mullioned window lighting the upper room belongs to the earlier phase. To the right of the entrance, a larger opening has a wide window of two large lights under a stone hood mould, now fitted with 20th-century Crittall-type metal cross-windows with diamond panes. The return elevation to the east has two steep gables with a valley between. The left-hand gable has a blocked doorway under a timber lintel. The right-hand bay has a late 20th-century ground-floor sash window in a reduced opening, which previously housed a three-light mullioned window with hood mould. Above this, in the gable, is a two-light mullioned window with hood mould, possibly originally for a loft but now providing high-level additional light to the meeting room. The rear north elevation is blind, with 20th-century refacing. The west gable-end elevation shows evidence of partial stone infilling in the central valley. The right-hand gable, linked to the adjoining house, is windowless and covered in part by the later lean-to addition, with a square ridge stack. The left-hand bay has a modern three-light window with diamond-leaded panes to the ground floor and an altered two-light window to the upper room, with Crittall-style cross-windows matching those in the main elevation.

The main entrance gives access to a small, early 19th-century panelled timber lobby, with doors leading left into the secondary room (in 2018 in use as the library) and right into the main meeting room. The two rooms are divided by a panelled partition with vertically-sliding shutters flanked by two chamfered posts on high stone plinths, which rise through both floors to support the roof valley above. The partition is fixed into a large-section chamfered ceiling beam. In the south-west corner of the library, a probably 17th-century ledged-and-boarded door with wrought-iron strap hinges leads to a stone winder stair, with treads later covered with oak boarding, ascending to the upper room. The stair terminates at a small landing with a short gallery balustrade and partly-exposed roof timbers, then gives access through a pegged 18th-century doorway with four-panelled door to the upper room. The upper floor retains its elm floorboards and historic graffiti on the stone window cills, including the dates 1683 and 1684, prior to the building's formal registration as a meeting house. An internal shuttered window, shown in historic photographs, which once gave onto the meeting room has been covered over but remains in place.

The interior of the meeting room essentially dates from the early 19th century, with a raised-and-fielded, high panelled dado around the perimeter, which sweeps up behind the stand on the east side. The stand has fixed seating and a raised and fielded panelled front, with a fixed bench in front. The joinery is all stripped pine, previously painted dark green until the 1950s. The floor is boarded; the walls and ceiling are plastered. On the east side, an upper window, possibly originally serving a loft, has been adapted to give light to the space below. A small portion of the roof structure above the meeting room shows a pegged structure with diagonally-set ridge piece and two rows of purlins, and a large number of original common rafters.

From the library, modern double doors in the western wall give access into the later lean-to extension (excluded from the listing).

The courtyard formed by the meeting house, 1 and 2 Quakers Close and the former Newman's Wool Warehouse (now part of Cossack Court) is enclosed by a short boundary wall and gateway on its eastern side. The wall is built from squared and coursed limestone with flat limestone capping, ramped up on either side to the gateway. The gateway is formed from a pair of monolithic limestone gatepiers with a pair of iron gates bearing elaborate fleur-de-lys finials to the railings.