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A tile on the pavement opposite the house records:

'No. 5 Old Town, the finest eighteenth-century house in Stratford, was built in 1732-3 for the gentleman-adventurer Abel Makepeace across two adjoining plots of land once belonging to the Stratford Corporation and the Thomas Lucas Charity. The architect may have been the well-known master mason, Francis Smith of Warwick, who worked on other buildings in the town at around this time.

Makepeace was able to fund the building work as the result of his marriage in 1731 to Martha Clopton, a wealthy widow. However, both he and his wife died within six years of the marriage, by which time they had fallen out. Their newly built Stratford home, with some of Martha's other property, was sold off to settle debts.

No. 5 Old Town subsequently passed through the hands of a succession of town gentry families until the mid 1880s when it became a school for young ladies. Following World War I it was divided into apartments and in the early 1930s became a hotel, the William and Mary. In 1960 the building was returned to its original residential use and continues as a private house.'