78 High Street

78 High Street is a house that was formerly a hospital. It dates from the early to mid-18th century and consists of two sections with later alterations. The building is rendered and has a pantile roof. It is two storeys high and has a symmetrical facade with two bays on the left and five bays on the right. On the ground floor to the left, there is a doorway with an ashlar quoined, basket-arched entrance leading to a passage. The first floor features four-pane sash windows with exposed flush sash boxes, with the windows in the third to seventh bays set higher than those in the first two bays. Between the second and third bays, there is a shaped kneeler and ashlar coping, and a large ridge stack is located in the third bay.

Inside, the ground-floor room in the sixth and seventh bays has an early 18th-century dado and wooden fielded panels separated by fluted pilasters that project forward at the cornice. It also includes fielded panel window shutters, a round-arched door with six fielded panels, and a simple fire surround decorated with an egg-and-dart motif, flanked by round-arched cupboards with leaved fielded panel doors and keyed architraves. At the rear, there is an early to mid-18th-century open-well staircase featuring column-on-vase turned balusters, three per step, and a wreathed handrail.

No 78 was the residence of Robert Raikes Fulthorpe Esq, known as Vine House, and in 1789 it boasted the largest vine in England, covering 137 square yards with a trunk circumference of nearly 4 feet. The Quarter Sessions were held here from 1720 to 1770. In the mid-19th century, it became the Post Office, and in 1877, it was converted into a cottage hospital.