Staircase House

Staircase House is a Grade II* listed medieval building dating from around 1460 situated in Stockport, historically in Cheshire, now within Greater Manchester, England.HistoryStaircase House, is, in its origins, a cruck timber building with its earliest known surviving timbers dating, on the basis of dendrochronology, from 1459–1460. Very little is known of the property's early history, though it is thought that it may have been the home of William Dodge who, in 1483, was the Mayor of Stockport.The first residents of whom we are certain were the Shallcross family who owned the House from 1605 to 1730. Members of the landed gentry, with their seat just across the county boundary, in Derbyshire, it was they who, in 1618, installed the distinctive Jacobean cage newel staircase, from which the house takes its modern name. The staircase has some unusual features, such as the carving covering much of the woodwork.The characteristic of a cage newel staircase, after which it is named, is that each of its newel posts extends throughout the full height of the staircase, the four posts and the banisters thus forming a stairwell which is not fully enclosed, but, rather, contained within a cage-like structure. In fact, at Staircase House, at some date before the first surviving descriptions of the staircase in nineteenth century, the newel posts were each sawn through, just below the stringer board and just above the handrail. That may have been done as a response to changing tastes, or possibly to overcome the practical difficulties of moving large objects, such as furniture, about the house.