This house and the adjacent clock tower are Grade II listed. The house dates from the C14th and C15th, and extended in C17th and C19th, it's now a tea-room and has a flat over. The clock tower is late C18th. The timber framed house is plastered and weatherboarded, and roofed with handmade red plain tiles. It is a narrow span of two bays facing the street and has a wider, parallel range to the rear. The hexagonal clock tower is built into the front left corner of the front range with a one-bay C14th wing to its rear. Further down the lane is a late C17th two-bay extension, and then a C19th extension of red brick in Flemish bond beyond that. The rear gable end is weatherboarded.
The house is of two storeys, and the clock tower of four stages. On the ground floor there is one C20th bow shop window and to the right an open foot passage which has the tearoom entrance off it. On the first floor there are two C20th metal casements with diamond leading. There is a continuous roof over both parallel ranges and the interior has several original features.
The tower is weatherboarded, with clock faces on the north and south-east elevations, a moulded and dentilled cornice below a domed lead roof, an iron reinforced hexagonal cupola with bell, an ogival metal roof with ball finial and iron weathervane. There are two painted inscriptions 'V.R. 1887', one either side of the south-east face. The clock tower was built in 1787 to replace a clock on the Corn Market House, which formerly stood in the middle of Market Hill, and which was demolished in that year. It was restored in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria's golden jubilee and there is a brass plaque on the south-east face above the panelled entrance door. It reads:-
This Tower was restored and a New Clock
erected therein, in Commemoration of
Queen Victoria's Jubilee,
21st June 1887
The Clock was started on 17th Decr 1888.
R.Curzo,Esq.,Chairman.
Vice Chairmen.
Rev.H.M.Patch. Rev.A.D.Philps.
Mr J.Beaumont. Mr O.Hanbury.
Mr J.S.Surridge. Mr F.W.Pfander Swinborne.
Thos Simpson, Treasurer.
E.P.Brown & J.A.Humphrey, Secretaries.
The blue plaque is fixed to the house wall above the open foot passage and reads:-
CLOCK HOUSE
14th & 15th C
ROOMS WERE LEASED
HERE 1787--1859
TO EDUCATE CHILDREN
OF THE POOR WITH
MONEY BEQUEATHED BY
SIR ROBERT HITCHAM
...and round the rim:- COGGESHALL HERITAGE SOCIETY - FROM FUNDS PROVIDED BY THE STANLEY PRENTICE LEGACY - OCT 2002.
This commemorates the house being the original site for the Hitcham School and was rented to the Hitcham Charity in 1787 for a period of 500 years! Two ground floor rooms were for the use of the master and up to 30 pupils were educated in the large upstairs room. The school closed here in 1859 after new premises were built in West Street.
As this is such a distinctive structure it is also used to display other plaques and trophies. Below the road name is a Calor trophy for 'Village of the Year, 2003, Eastern England and Home Counties', and a wooden board displaying four 'Petre Trophies' for 'Rural Community Council of Essex, Best Kept Village of the Year' for 1998, 2001, 2002, and 2003.