The Log Cabin, Formerly The Yorkshire Grey

The Log Cabin, formerly the Yorkshire Grey, is a former coaching inn dating to around 1740. It stands on the High Street with brick walls, rendered on the front elevation, and is topped with a modern clay tile hipped roof. The ground floor features ceramic tile facing.

The main section consists of seven bays across three storeys, with double bowed fronts. Originally, it contained four rooms per floor—two at the front and two at the back—though later subdivisions have altered this arrangement. A full-height main stair, positioned towards the back and centre of the building, serves the floors. An attached two-storey wing contains a function room at first-floor level, accessed via a projecting rear stair lit by sash windows.

The High Street elevation displays seven bays with an adjoining former function room of three bays. The seven-bay section features two full-height canted bays. The ground floor has a late nineteenth-century tiled wall surface, now painted over, decorated with simple mouldings consistent with public house decoration of that period. The first and second floors retain late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century sash windows. The adjoining function room has similar late nineteenth-century ground floor treatment, with large early nineteenth-century sashes above. A central ramped parapet feature crowns the elevation. On the far left, a gated carriage entrance leads through to a large yard.

The cellar is accessed via a small wooden door in a back room and contains three boldly geometric brick semicircular fireplaces of considerable beauty. At least one of the front canted bays extends from the cellar upwards. The ground floor has been substantially altered through continuous redevelopment as a public house from the eighteenth century onwards, but retains some eighteenth-century cornices in the back rooms. Most ceilings feature late nineteenth-century match boarding of varying widths. The joinery exposed behind the bar is of interest, displaying a crackle finish, early nineteenth-century flush reeding, and a long blocked-up door. A section of eighteenth-century modillion cornice survives in a pocket between rooms.

The main stair is the principal surviving historic feature. Part winding and closed-string, it features slender turned balusters and Tuscan column newel posts rising to the top of the property around a narrow well. It displays the characteristic mid-eighteenth-century wainscoted dado, with attractively awkward junctions as it ascends.

The first floor originally contained four rooms, with wainscoting up to dado level. Wainscoting of possibly eighteenth-century origin exists in a puzzling central partition dividing the front two rooms, creating a smaller central closet-like space. The internal treatment of the bows is particularly elegant, with continuous modillion cornicing and moulded window architraves, shuttering, and flanking dado-level wainscoting. Despite considerable partitioning, original eighteenth-century cornicing survives in each room or space, with more elaborate mouldings reserved for the front rooms. The function room retains its window architraves, an unusually deep plain cove, and two moulded roundels for ceiling illumination.

The second floor contains no cornicing but retains wainscoting up to dado level. A single original blocked fireplace survives in a corridor on the top floor. Original, often broad, deal floor-boarding of irregular gauge is found throughout the first and second floors. Several original deep cupboards are built into the thickness of various walls.

The building has functioned as a public house since at least 1776. It appears on Rocque's London Survey of 1745 and Chapman and Andre's London map of 1777. Published references note that the Yorkshire Grey was rebuilt in the late nineteenth century—a statement certainly true of the ground floor—but the first and second floors largely survived this alteration. In 1821, James Brooks, a Stratford brewer, conveyed the property to James Thomson, also of Stratford. Earlier records are unavailable, though the building was conveyed to John Brooks by lease and release dated 5 and 6 October 1809 by George Norman and Christopher Godmond.

It is included as a rare example of a coaching inn on a principal route east out of London and for the survival of its largely mid-eighteenth-century interior.