Hung well
When I was staring at the medieval arch in my previous post and checking my camera, a woman came up to me and said that if I liked old buildings, I should look at one a couple of doors along the street. This was a slate-hung building with a very unusual set of shapes cut into the slates. I told her I’d already spotted it and she said that the shapes cut into the slates – hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades – were there because the building was once ‘a gaming house’. I've not been able to find any reference to this history in books or online – I have few books on Devon apart from the usual Pevsner and Shell Guides. It’s possible, but it’s equally likely that someone just liked the shapes and had a bright idea about how to use them them.
3 comments:
The appearance of staining on the soffits at the roof valley, the fact the attic windows aren't placed symmetrically and the loss of hung tiles on that upper storey, suggests a bit of a botched job and possibly real damp problems developing?
I do hope someone deals with this soon,before the whole building suffers.
It's an attractive bit of the townscape.
I wonder if this is an example of an older building that got a fashionable Georgianesque front rather than a rebuild. Hence the slightly odd window positions and proportions.
The odd window positions could well be due to a surviving, earlier timber frame under the slates, with, as you suggest, TomC, a ‘Georgianisation’ to keep up with fashion. This sort of thing happened quite a bit.
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