Many of Maldon's town centre buildings are timber-framed and date from Tudor or even late medieval times. But unlike the famous village of Lavenham in Suffolk, which is filled with picture-postcard houses with painted wooden framing and jetties (first-floor overhangs) we have to do some detective work to uncover a lot of Maldon's older heritage.

It's Maldon's continued prosperity that explains this: fashions change, and quaint timber framed houses were refaced in Georgian times with imposing brick facades. Only by looking up at the roof line (for example with the Maldon Lettings premises in the photograph) can we see this. Ironically, it was Lavenham's decline in the 1600s that led its medieval and Tudor buildings to remain unmodified.

New facades for old buildings continue to be popular, not always with pleasant results – who can forget Vera Duckworth's choice of synthetic stone cladding for her terrace house in 1989's Coronation Street?

Maldon's Georgian frontages however fit well with the varied styles to be seen in the High Street, including some substantial Georgian mansions that were built from new.

There are some Tudor houses that survive in their original form. A notable example is the Vicarage behind All Saints, a hall structure with two cross wings, the framing painted black (a fashion that actually came in during Victorian times).

Jetties (the overhanging upper floors that many may have seen in the famous Shambles in York) are visible at the back of the Blue Boar, and in a number of shops in town. The Townrow building shows this clearly, but large modern display windows have infilled the bottom part, whereas the very similar building occupied by Il Camino retains more of its original look (much easier for hospitality venues).

The picture from Shrewsbury shows how startling the new facades can be: an imposing frontage now used for a bank fills in one side, but the side facing the other way was never changed, and has all the features we associate with Tudor buildings – jetties, painted wooden studding and a prominent gable end.

Of course, looking up at roof lines is not straightforward in our High Street, not least because all those "new" facades have substantially narrowed the pavements over the years and we have to keep all our attention on dodging fellow shoppers!