Historic Droitwich Its Streets and People

The building (No 20 and 22) is a two-bay timber-frame structure, with 3 oak trusses, one at each end and one in the middle.  The surviving first and second floor exterior walls are of close studding with a horizontal mid-rail;  a popular style which appears on other surviving Droitwich buildings.  It is thought to have been of 2½ storeys originally, so had ground, first and attic floors with windows at each level.  Dated by dendrochronology to 1657, it is of great interest as little is known specifically about timber-frame buildings of this time; within 10 years, brick had taken over as the material for most new structures. 

The doorway into No. 20 is placed centrally in the street frontage, and may well be the original entrance. 

The first floor was jettied, and the jetty post (which widens out towards its top end) remains in its original location near the north end of the west wall of the ground floor shop of No. 20.  The timber framing is visible: square or rectangular panels with straight downward and diagonal braces. 

Within the shop there is a substantial ceiling beam and as this has mortices (sockets) on its underside into which vertical studs would have been fixed, it shows where an internal wall would have been located in the original building.  On a north-south alignment, this wall is placed approximately two-thirds of the distance from the  west wall of No. 20 towards its eastern end wall (the party wall with No. 22).  This suggests that, in the original single building (Nos, 20 and 22 now), there would have been either three small rooms across the frontage (the central one possibly an entrance hall), or one smaller and one larger room.  The latter may be indicated as the axial beam running at right angles from the beam mentioned goes through into No. 22 and across its ceiling also.