Building record IKN 144 - Potters Row, High Street

Potters Row is a red-brick terrace of four cottages built in 1854 for the workers of an adjoining pottery. Although built on land which then belonged to the extensive Sudbourne Estate of the Marquis of Hertford it bears a date plaque with the initials of John Chambers along with its present name. Chambers appears in contemporary trade directories and other documents as the proprietor of ‘Iken Pottery’, which appears to have been established on the site of an earlier estate brickworks alongside the terrace but closed at the end of the 19th century. The nature of the pottery produced is unknown, and a potentially interesting subject for future research, but the business later diversified into sanitary wares and drain pipes.
The cottages were entered from the south, but the northern elevation facing the road was built as an unusual display facade without doors, effectively disguising the structure’s true purpose, presumably in deference to the Estate which was used by the gentry for sporting purposes. Each tenement was of ‘two-up two-down’ form, with a heated living-room-come-kitchen and a narrow pantry bay containing an enclosed staircase. By the time of the property’s sale in 1981 the four had become a pair of semi-detached houses that was subsequently combined into one. Large brick wings were added behind the outermost cottages, linked by a glazed lean-to conservatory and replacing smaller structures shown on earlier Ordnance Surveys. In consequence the southern elevation is now almost unrecognisable, with no evidence of the paired entrance doors which must have opened into each chimney corner, and the internal partitions have been largely removed. A single original fireplace and enclosed staircase survive in the penultimate western cottage. The property’s principal historic interest lies in its unusual northern facade, which remains unaltered apart from the replacement of its windows, and its association with Iken Pottery of which it now represents the only remaining structural evidence (S1).