Building record SUY 170 - Cellars at 41-42 Market Hill (LA) HBR

The building on the site of 41-42 Market Hill was completely destroyed by fire in September 2015, leaving only the brick walls of its two basement cellars intact. In its most recent form the grade II-listed property was a 19th century red-brick structure on three stories that had operated since the 1870s as Robert Mattingly’s Gentlemen’s Outfitters. The site was previously occupied by a medieval inn known as the White Hart that extended to the corner of Gainsborough Street on the north and included the Anchor Public House at 40 Market Hill and 2 Friars Street to the south. The main cellar beneath the street facade contains several phases of construction, illustrating the site’s complex history. The earliest brickwork in the eastern wall adjoining the pavement and the southern gable may survive from the White Hart but could also relate to Goldsmith’s mansion. It incorporates the base of a southern chimney that is understood to have abutted a 17th century wall painting of a mounted horseman on the timber-framed gable of 2 Friars Street (which originally decorated a room on the site of no. 41). The back wall was rebuilt in the 19th century and preserves the most recent set of cellar steps, and is probably contemporary with a vaulted recess that projects by 4.25 m (14 ft) beneath the pavement at the northern end of the front wall. Two light vents lined with white glazed tiles were cut into the earlier brickwork of the front wall in the late-19th or early-20th century, probably when a new cellar was built to the rear of 40 Market Hill. This smaller cellar preserves an original basement fireplace along with a canted western gable that was shown on the Ordnance Survey of 1904 but not that of 1884. Two wells also survive on the site, of which the northernmost consists of stone and flint-rubble in a manner that indicates a medieval origin. Excavation of its content may yield material of historic interest as the well lay beneath the rear part of the building in 1884, and ritual deposits are often associated with the early capping of wells (S1).