The Corn Exchange is a commercial building in Withersfield Road in

Haverhill, Suffolk Haverhill ( , ) is a market town and civil parish in the West Suffolk district, in the county of Suffolk, England, next to the borders of Essex and Cambridgeshire. It lies about southeast of Cambridge and northeast of central London. In 202 ...

, England. The structure, which is currently vacant and deteriorating, is a Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

History

The first

corn exchange A corn exchange is a building where merchants trade grains. The word "corn" in British English denotes all cereal grains, such as wheat and barley; in the United States these buildings were called grain exchanges. Such trade was common in towns ...

in the town was erected in the High Street just to the south of St Mary's Parish Church in 1857. However, in the mid-1880s, a group of local businessmen decided to form a private company, to be known as the "Haverhill Corn Exchange Company Limited", to finance and commission a new and more substantial corn exchange for the town. The site they selected was the forecourt of the old livestock market. The new building was designed by Frank Whitmore in the

Renaissance Revival style Renaissance Revival architecture (sometimes referred to as "Neo-Renaissance") is a group of 19th-century architectural revival styles which were neither Greek Revival nor Gothic Revival but which instead drew inspiration from a wide range of ...

, built in red brick and completed in 1889. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage of three bays facing onto Withersfield Road. The central bay featured a short flight of steps leading up to a round-headed opening with

voussoir A voussoir ( UK: ; US: ) is a wedge-shaped element, typically a stone, which is used in building an arch or vault.“Voussoir, N., Pronunciation.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7553486115. Acces ...

s and a keystone flanked by

Doric order The Doric order is one of the three orders of ancient Greek and later Roman architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian. The Doric is most easily recognized by the simple circular capitals at the top of t ...

columns supporting an entablature, inscribed with the words "Corn Exchange", and a

balustrade A baluster () is an upright support, often a vertical moulded shaft, square, or lathe-turned form found in stairways, parapets, and other architectural features. In furniture construction it is known as a spindle. Common materials used in its ...

. The other bays were fenestrated by a bi-partite round headed windows on the ground floor. The first floor was well set back in relation to the ground floor and was fenestrated by a tri-partite segmentally headed window with an

architrave In classical architecture, an architrave (; , also called an epistyle; ) is the lintel or beam, typically made of wood or stone, that rests on the capitals of columns. The term can also apply to all sides, including the vertical members, ...

and a keystone. There was a gable above which was surmounted a double

ogee An ogee ( ) is an object, element, or curve—often seen in architecture and building trades—that has a serpentine- or extended S-shape (Sigmoid curve, sigmoid). Ogees consist of a "double curve", the combination of two semicircle, semicircula ...

-shaped pediment. The architectural historian,

Nikolaus Pevsner Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (195 ...

, was unimpressed with the design which he described as being "of little merit". The use of the building as a corn exchange declined significantly in the wake of the Great Depression of British Agriculture in the late 19th century. Instead, it was used as a community events centre, before being acquired by St Felix Catholic Church for use as their social club. St Felix Catholic Church then sold the building to a developer to fund a new church in Princess Way in 2006. However, the new owner failed to maintain the building and, after it remained vacant and deteriorating for over a decade, St Edmundsbury Borough Council served a notice on the owners, in May 2017, demanding that repairs be carried out. Haverhill Town Council subsequently considered acquiring the dilapidated building but, in October 2017, abandoned its plans to do so after the owner's lenders decided to block any proposed sale.

References

{{reflist Commercial buildings completed in 1889 Haverhill, Suffolk Grade II listed buildings in Suffolk Haverhill

History

See also

References