Building record 1245070000 - LARKINS GREEN

Grade II. C17 altered and extended C18 and later. Southern section original, 2-bay timber framed house with painted plaster infill, tiled roof. 2-storey and attic, door with modern open gabled porch right of centre, three modern casements, two modern hipped dormers. Large brick stack to north gable, lower part of C17 brick. 1 window link to north, 2-storeys, painted brick, connecting with higher C18 block, rendered and painted, tiled roof at higher level, one modern 3-light casement to each floor. Modern additions to north (B1).
The house is of 1 1/2 storeys, and was originally of three or possibly four bays. Only two bays survive intact (II and III). The remains of another can be traced to the south. The bay to the north of the stack is a twentieth century construction, using old timbers, but two features suggest that the original house, too, may have had a fourth bay in this position. One is the presence of a doorway in the north end wall, next to the stack - a most unlikely
position for an external door. The other is the fact that the eastern wall plate projects 15" (0.37 m) beyond what is now the northern gable, and has been broken off at that point. Another feature demanding explanation is that the stack overlaps the end wall by 1'. The intact bays formed a single room, 16' x 14' (4.92 x 4.3 m), and the southern bay is shown by a surviving wallplate to have been 10' (3.07 m) long. The two-bay hall never had a tie-beam in its central truss; the downward slope of its joists, from bearer to rail, is not due to any distortion of the frame, but to the fact that the soffit of the bearer is level with the top of the rail. It is clearly an insertion. The joists are chamfered, with step-and-tongue stops, but the workmanship is crude. A fireplace bressumer has been re-used as a post in the modern rebuild of Bay I, and it is for consideration whether it is from a second stack, or whether this and the re-used timber north of the stack came from Ongar Hill Farmhouse. The bearer there would have fitted Bay I, so an on-site origin is to be preferred; this would mean that Larkins Green was a two-hearth house - though not necessarily at first. If so, it is the one occupied by a John Wingrove in 1662. The fireplace brickwork contains a number of two-inch bricks, including the voussoirs of a blocked oven opening.
These features can be reconciled by postulating an open-hall house, with a smoke-bay at one end and a two-storey wing at the other; the surviving wall plate shows the latter to have been in line, not transverse. The central truss was perhaps of the arch-braced collar type. Studs surviving above the ties in the other trusses suggest that they had queen-posts and clasped purlins: the total loss of the original roof puts certainty beyond reach. When the
smoke-bay was replaced by a stack, the builders respected what was either a closet at the west side, or a doorway to a fourth full bay beyond, and this led to the stack overlapping the end of the house; the gap left for the doorway at the west side was very narrow, which may indicate a closet rather than a passage.
Documentary evidence supports a date consistent with these ideas. The house is built on part of the demesne of Amersham Stockbury; Walter Tredway, tenant of Coleshill Manor (Stock Place) in the early sixteenth century, had also a lease of this land. During his tenancy there would have been no need for a farmhouse here, but on his death, between 1546 and 1549, when Edmund Waller took the manor, the need for a house at Larkins Green would have been felt at once. It is therefore suggested that Larkins Green was built shortly before 1550, and modernised and given a second stack around 1600. [Plan and sections] (B2).