3, High Street

909/0/10005 HIGH STREET 17-MAR-04 3

II Town house, now photographer's studio and shop premises. C15 with C19 and C20 alterations and extensions. Rendered and whitewashed timber-frame with rubblestone and brick to rear. Plain tile roof. 2 storeys, attic and cellar. Front is a 2-window range at first floor of C20 windows with a C20 shop front below. Doors to far left and centre right. Rear has a 2-storey C19 brick wing and a lean-to extension. C20 fenestration. Rear wall is of rubblestone with part rebuilt in brick and the rubblestone section has, set high in the wall, half of a moulded stone lintel with a depressed Tudor arch profile. INTERIOR. Ground floor has C20 character but retains intersecting bridging beams with a wide flat chamfer which have slight ogee stops. The front to rear beam is probably in the line of the chamfered wall post on the floor above and one of the C15 roof trusses in the roof space. First floor is also mainly C20 in character but an old lintel is visible above a front window and also a part of a bridging beam. In the roof space there is close-studded framing on the upper part of the front wall and in the right hand (west) gable wall. There are remains of a lateral stack in the rear wall. Jowled wall posts and curved braces support the roof trusses. Roof is of two and a half bays of cambered tie beam trusses with two tiers of through purlins with curved wind-braces. The trusses are very unusual in that they are a king and queen post combination. Queen post with struts from the ties to the lower tier of purlins and curved braces from the collars to the upper tier of purlins, then in the centre is a king post rising from the tie to the apex of the principal rafters. The survival of so much structure of a C15 house in a Northamptonshire urban setting is of considerable special architectural interest.