Building record KND 045 - Forge Cottage

Forge Cottage was shown with its present outline on the Ordnance Survey of 1881 and was built on former common land in or about the 1860s to serve as the dwelling of a newly established wheelwright’s shop and forge. It therefore represents one of the oldest houses in the village of Coldfair Green, which developed rapidly in the mid-19th century as a satellite settlement of the growing industrial town of Leiston to the north. As such the cottage is of considerable local historic significance, particularly as the new business appears to have manufactured fly-wheels to supply the agricultural engineers for which Leiston was famous throughout the world. The structure of the cottage survives largely unaltered and is also of historic interest as an unusually early example of a single-storied bungalow with heated rooms to both front and rear. Traditional single-storied cottages of the early-19th century and before were of only one room in depth but contained attic rooms within the steeper slopes of their thatched roofs - although the Indian term was confined to more ornamental examples with verandas in the mid-19th century and was not applied more broadly until its final decades. The building was initially highly ornamental, with imitation stone quoins and flat-arches of white brick contrasting with its red-brick fabric and the glazed pantiles of its roof. This decoration extended to its gable chimneys where it remains visible, but is hidden by paint and render elsewhere. With the possible exception of a marble fire surround in the northern front room the interior has lost its original fixtures and fittings, and its windows have been replaced in PVC, but the historic character of the eastern facade is undiminished (S1).