North Street, Folkestone, Kent

Extract

This street is close to the area of Folkestone which suffered severely from enemy action; indeed certain of the houses, which were once at its southern end, no longer exist. Examination of the remaining houses, several of them shaken by blast, was undertaken with a view to the removal of any fittings of value, should it be decided to demolish them.

This examination led at once to the realization that nearly all of the remaining houses, nos. 13 to 49 (on the western side) and 16 to 44 (on the eastern), are of seventeenth-century type with but one room on each floor, ground, first, and attic. Many hundreds of this type of seventeenth-century house have recently been studied at Great Yarmouth, where some dated examples belong to the first half of the century. At that town certain features occur in all houses of that half-century so far studied. They are (1) a front door and a back door opposite to one another with connecting passage, off which opened the ground-floor room; (2) a fire-place on the side of the room opposite to the passage, flanked on one side by a cupboard with a small window lighting it and on the other side by a winding stair, closed at the bottom by a door; and (3) the continuance of this stair to the attic floor with small windows lighting it between each floor. Stop-chamfered beams are, of course, very frequently found.