Bepton Court

Bepton Court

A listed building comprising two timber-framed ranges facing Bepton Road and West Street, originally of late medieval character and extensively modified and subdivided for commercial and residential use.

The Bepton Road range is built in two storeys with three irregular bays. The ground floor has been largely replaced in painted masonry and now contains two large late twentieth-century shop windows and a shop entrance. The first floor retains irregular timber casements. The roof is hipped to the north and half-hipped to the south, where the gable wall is constructed of coursed limestone rubble with red, brown and grey brick quoins and window openings. The quoins at the street angle are rendered. Two and three-light timber casement windows sit beneath reworked cambered arches, with one blocked window opening beneath the eaves. The rear wall is tile-hung.

The Bepton Road range may originally have comprised a central hall or chamber, now fitted with an inserted floor and ceiling, flanked by two-storey wings all under a hipped or half-hipped roof. The recessed central bay and overall layout are typical of a Wealden house plan, though the northern bay may have been rebuilt.

The West Street elevation is also in two storeys and is largely replaced or cased in painted brick, with a clear division marking the junction between the north-south and east-west ranges. The eastern bays have a rendered parapet above a brick dentil cornice and two and three-light timber casements. The ground floor is largely replaced with large shop windows. Behind this, the West Street range includes added rear bays with half-hipped roofs, tile-hung and constructed above a twentieth-century ground floor extended in brick. A two and a half storey wing projects to the south-east, clad in horizontal weatherboarding and dating to the later nineteenth or twentieth century; it has been heavily restored. A later timber-framed building faces West Street; its rear wall, now internal, forms the inner corridor wall.

The building has been converted to flats with inserted partitions, new stairs and a corridor built within the rear half-hipped bays, partly obscuring the original fabric.

Flat 1 contains an exposed timber frame with a pair of jowled posts and cut-off top plate at the outer street face of each truss, characteristic of a recessed central bay typical of a Wealden house. The former recessed outer wall has been removed and replaced with a wall aligned with the flanking bays, and no mortices for supporting brackets survive. The crown post roof has plain slender shafts and braces to the collar and collar purlin, the latter hidden behind a suspended ceiling. The south room (bedroom) has exposed close studding on the outer wall and repaired framing elsewhere.

Flat 2 has exposed framing on the rear of the bedroom and bathroom wall. The rear wall of the Bepton Road range is arch-braced, with no surviving close studding to match that in Flat 1. A mortice for a sliding window or shutter survives in the stop-chamfered top plate of the West Street elevation. The roof above West Street has been repaired with some timbers replaced in softwood. An arch-braced collar of an open truss with pairs of coupled rafters appears to relate to an early phase of the structure. Half-hipped rear roofs have been repaired and reworked. Between the main and rear roof is a small area of unplastered wattle partition.

All roofs are pitched tiles. The ground floor has been reordered to provide shops and accommodation, with reworking of the timber frame and roofs on the first floor, reusing and introducing new material.