Details
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ST5873SE
901-1/11/85
BRISTOL
COLSTON STREET (east side)
The Three Kings Court
Foster's Almshouses and attached walls, railings and gates
(Formerly listed as Foster's Almshouses and attached walls, railings and gates, COLSTON STREET, previously listed as: COLSTON STREET (east side) Foster's Almshouses)
04/03/77
GV
II*
Includes: Nos.9-11 Foster's Almshouses CHRISTMAS STEPS. Almshouses. West wing 1861, north wing 1872, south and east wings 1880-83. By Foster and Wood.
MATERIALS: brick with black diaper work, limestone dressings, ridge and lateral stacks and tiled hipped roofs with leaded finials and tops of towers.
PLAN: double-depth plan to three sides of a courtyard with a south wing. French Burgundian Gothic Revival style.
EXTERIOR: two storeys, basement and attic; 6:5:5-window ranges to inside of courtyard. Moulded ground-floor drips, ovolo eaves cornices carved with fruit and leaves, decorative iron gutters, with dragons to hoppers and across the down pipe at drip height; good cast lead foliate finials to the ends of the hips, decorative ridge tiles, ridge stacks to each end of roof with diagonal ribs and moulded cornices to each range, and similar lateral stacks with linked pairs of stacks. Mullion and casement windows, decorative narrow windows with trefoil ogee heads, with metal casements.
The courtyard has square three storey towers in the inner corners with open elliptical ground-floor arches on round columns, with an ogee hood with crockets to the right hand tower rising through a relief carving of the almshouses; first floor corner statue niches with canted canopies, a figure in the right hand one, with two-light second floor windows, and leaded ogee pyramidal roofs with corner cast lead crockets and finials.
Gabled timber-framed two storey porches to the centre of the east range and left of centre of the north range with open two-centre arches, open each side on the first floor to full-width stone balconies on brackets with lattice timber railings, which extend into a timber winder stair tower in the north west corner, with eight corner buttresses and a central newel post, and a tiled conical roof; the south range has a gabled timber porch with moulded curved sides; double half-glazed doors. Cross windows to the north range, three-light mullion windows to the east and south; a corner oriel on the south west corner of the courtyard has a carved moulded base, aprons and heads, attached corner buttresses, and a conical lead roof with good finial.
The elevation to Christmas Steps is a ten window range, with a ground floor string, first floor continuous drip and label moulds; matching ground and first floor windows, canted two-light oriels two and four from the left, cross windows one, two and four from the right, single mullion windows the rest, a two-light dormer three from the left with a square panel in the gable. Basement arcade of six semicircular arches on chamfered square columns with octagonal capitals and bases, getting taller to the left, with plate-glass shop fronts.
Colston Street front is a six-window range with a stepped plinth, canted oriel two from the right with a three-light window beneath, with a right hand lateral stack. Rear elevations have four gabled dormers with triple quatrefoils, separated by a set-back corner block.
INTERIOR: stone floors on moulded beams, stone winder stair with wrought iron barley sugar balusters and newels, moulded rails, panelled shutters and four-panel doors, with barley sugar window catches.
SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: attached front wall across the courtyard has sunken quatrefoils and a wrought-iron railing with fleur-de-lys and small finials, lamps on square piers to elaborate wrought iron double gates. Rear retaining wall has attached spike-headed wrought iron railings.
HISTORICAL NOTE: Foster's Almshouses were founded by John Foster in 1483. A finely detailed composition accounting well for the lower Christmas Street elevation, and modelled on the Hotel Dieu, Beaune.
Listing NGR: ST5860873171
