17 High Street

History: Little is known about the building history of this site: occupied by at least the early C17, there was at one time a poors' tenement known as Chelsea Barracks here: the unconventional form of this building, and the character of its detailing, suggest that the present building may have been intended for institutional use, though it is now a pair of private houses.

Exterior: Rough local limestone rubble with slate roof carried on modillion eaves cornice; brick gable end axial stacks. 3 storeys, 4-window range, with passage entrance to right of centre. No 17 is entered from the passage; doorway to No 18 is at the far right, an insertion which displaces the otherwise regular alignment of openings. A passage entry corresponding to that in No 17 is disused. Incised 8-panel doors with overlight, in architrave with raised diamond motif in entablature, and mutules to cornice hood. Round-arched passage entry. Wide 3-light mullioned and transomed windows with small panes and cambered stone voussoir heads to ground and first floor, and similar lower mullioned windows in attic storey.

Interior: No 17 has steep early C19 staircase running up the centre of the house: 2 rooms on each floor to the front (modified to create one large room to first floor), and a large and a small room on each floor to the rear. Access throughout is directly off the staircase, an unusual arrangement in which the small rear room and the upper front room are approached via a small landing, and the rear large room via a secondary flight of stairs. The second front room is only reached via the first front room. Roof truss of unusual type, in which a king-post has chamfered joints with 2 pairs of braces, themselves cross-braced to the king-post and the tie-beam.

A striking urban building of considerable character.

References: Robert Owen,'Welshpool Landmarks', Montgomeryshire Collections, Vol.38, 1918, p.155; Ion Trant, The Changing Face of Welshpool, 1986, p.30.