house

Terraced two-bay four-storey house, built c.1800, refaced c.1900, with recent shopfront to ground floor. Now in commercial use together with neighbour. M-profile slate roof hipped to south with rendered brick chimneystacks to north party wall. Roof hidden behind parapet wall with granite coping and cast-iron hopper and downpipe breaking through to south end, shared with adjoining building. Red brick walls laid in Flemish bond. Gauged brick flat-arch window openings with granite sills and replacement single-pane timber sliding sash windows. Single window opening to first floor with tripartite timber sliding sash window having moulded capital surviving to one mullion.

Capel Street was laid out in 1680 by Humphrey Jervis as a prestigious residential street and named after Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex. By 1800 the street had become one of the city’s primary commercial thoroughfares and the current plot ratios reflect the buildings of that period. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many buildings had been refaced which appears to be the case with this house. The roof plan, graduated fenestration and plot ratio conform to an early nineteenth-century date disguised by a late nineteenth-century brick façade which adds to the complex evolving nature of this historic streetscape.