Westgate Street runs south-east to north-west through the city, to the south of the
cathedral. It is "by far the longest and most important street of
medieval Gloucester". The Old Judges House stands at No. 26, with a narrow passageway, Maverdine Lane, to the right. David Verey and Alan Brooks, in their
Gloucestershire 2 volume in the
Pevsner Buildings of England series, revised and re-issued in 2002, describe it as "the most magnificent 16/17th
timber-framed merchant's house remaining" in the city. The building dates from the late-15th century when it was built as a combined shop and house. It was much enlarged and embellished in the late-16th/early-17th centuries. In the 18th, the façade onto Westgate street was refaced in stone. In the early 19th century it was used as
lodgings for
judges on the
Western Assize circuit. The quality of the building's accommodation generated some criticism; one judge referred to it as a "badly drained, ill-ventilated, foetid dog-hole". In 1888 the building became the headquarters and shop of the Winfields
seed company which undertook further alterations. ==Architecture and description==