40, Church Street

This is a house within a row, dating from the 15th or early 16th century, with significant internal remodelling in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The front was updated in the early 19th century. The building is constructed with braced box timber framing, a brick facade in Flemish bond, and a tile roof, featuring a brick stack.

The plan consists of a single room facing the street, with a rear staircase on the left and a narrower rear hall. A right-hand passage runs through the property. It is part of the long terrace of numbers 39 to 51, retaining much of its original fabric but with a refronted facade in the 19th century. The terrace underwent substantial refurbishment in the late 1960s, and number 40 was left as it was at that time.

The front of the building is three storeys and has a basement, with a two-window front. It has 12-pane windows to the second floor above 16-pane windows to the first and ground floors, all set within stone cills and V-joint voussoirs. A six-panel door is located on the far right, under a transom light, with voussoirs matching the windows. A grille covers the basement window on the left. A three-course brick string runs above the ground floor, and a coped parapet tops the facade. The rear of the property features braced framing with two full-height gables, including a dormer window facing south. A ridge stack and an external gable stack are present; the latter has a Tudor-arched doorway with a ribbed door to the left side and a 17th-century four-light window with ovolo mouldings to the left return.

The interior features square-framed side walls with diagonal braces. The front section, originally with two gables facing the street, has a two-bay collar truss roof with clasped purlins, wind braces front and rear, common rafters, and no ridge piece. The right-hand roof has a cut tie beam, partly restored around 1970. On the first floor is an early 17th-century flat-arched stone fire surround with ovolo and cavetto moulding to cyma stops, a painted left-hand splay, and a rear window with a 17th-century metal frame containing a turn buckle and draw handle. A brick-lined cellar includes a rear staircase leading up. The rear hall shows exposed framing and an inserted first floor with three lateral and axial bridging beams with wide chamfers, creating a coffered ground-floor ceiling. A 17th-century Tudor-arched ground-floor fire surround, similarly moulded to the front, is also present. A winder staircase leads from the ground floor, potentially with a blocked window recess in the ground-floor left-hand wall, and a rear lateral staircase rises to the attic.

The house possesses outstanding historical interest as part of a particularly significant surviving medieval terrace, originally built as a speculative development for the Abbey.