Farmstead record SBK 073 - Farmstead: Grove Farm

Grove Farm, Stradbroke. 19th century farmstead and 16th century farmhouse. Regular courtyard U-shaped plan formed by working agricultural buildings, with a second smaller yard. The farmhouse is set away from the yard. Partial loss (less than 50%) of the traditional farm buildings. Located within a village (S1-6).

Recorded as part of the Farmsteads in the Suffolk Countryside Project. This is a purely desk-based study and no site visits were undertaken. These records are not intended to be a definitive assessment of these buildings. Dating reflects their presence at a point in time on historic maps and there is potential for earlier origins to buildings and farmsteads. This project highlights a potential need for a more in depth field study of farmstead to gather more specific age data.


The principal barn at Grove Farm appeared on the 1835 Tithe map and displays the construction characteristics contemporaneous with the farmhouse. The barn's siting appears to relate much more to the farmhouse as a conventional farmstead. A further building, appears close to the road where located on the 1835 Tithe map, but by 1886 this has been replaced by the current range of buildings. In more recent times during the 20th century modern agricultural buildings have been added to the complex to meet the needs of modern farming.

2021: Grove Farm Barn originally was a five bay barn, built between the late 16th and early 17th century, but which was further extended eastwards by two smaller bays in the 18th century and which were used as cattle stalls, complete with pitching hole and gallery storage over. The threshing entrance porch in the centre bay northwards is also a later addition of typically 18th century conformation. The timber frame construction in almost all bays highlights the very early construction so typical of 16th/early 17th century, and the two added eastern most bays show distinct 18th century configuration. In the main barn a first floor has been inserted entirely within the existing structure, with the exception of the cutting out of one of the tie beams, this has left the existing structure untouched. In the east bay the first floor appears to be original to the 18th century alterations and would have provided food storage for the cattle beneath. The roof of the whole barn was replaced in the 20th century, however the certain parts of the wall plate display joints typical of pre-1650 construction.
A range of mid-19th century, red brick, single storey buildings, wrapped around two sides of a courtyard, had dual use as a partly open fronted animal shelter and secondly as a former dairy building. The roof is composed of red clay pantiles (S7).

2023: The single-storied pantiled outbuildings to the east of the grade II-listed former farmhouse at Grove Farm were built in the 1850s or 60s as part of a new cattle yard. Similar sheds and yards were added to the south and west of the nearby threshing barn to create a typical ‘High Victorian’ complex. The northern side of the cattle yard was formed by a shelter-shed depicted with an open southern elevation on the 1884 Ordnance Survey while the adjoining shed on the east was shown as enclosed and may have been designed as a cow shed. In later years it too operated as an open shelter-shed and was shown as such in a photograph of 2012.
The building that faced the house to the west of the yard was a domestic coach house containing a trap or cart shed to the north and a stable to the south. This coach house consisted entirely of brick with an internal partition of clay-lump that still survives. The northern walls of the shelter-shed and eastern shed were also of brick where they were visible from the farm yard, but the latter’s rear wall was visible only from a paddock and consisted of timber-framing rendered externally with clay daub. The complex illustrates the agricultural revolution in East Anglia during the mid-19th century, which saw similar yards built on many local farms, and the continued use of inexpensive vernacular materials in combination with brick where they were hidden from view. It is accordingly of historic interest. The coach house is a generally well preserved example of a once common building form that is now increasingly rare, representing the Victorian equivalent of a garage for a horse and trap. Few examples of this modest scale survive. The shelter-shed and the shed to the east have largely collapsed in recent years but key elements still remain to inform their reconstruction (S8).