Description

LEATHERHEAD EPSOM ROAD TQ/15/NE (north side) 3/134

4.12.80 Dining Hall on north side of courtyard at St John's School, 2 boarding houses on east side, with cloisters attached to these, and main building on south side

GV II

School dining hall with cloisters, two boarding houses, and main school building. Begun 1872. Red brick with limestone dressings, slate roofs, copper fleches. Mostly in Flemish Gothic style. The dining hall is rectangular with an apsidal west end, and single-storey with the appearance of 2½ storeys, symmetrical, with buttresses, parapet and small octagonal embattled corner turrets ; the central entrance has a porch formed by 3 bays projected from the cloister (which covers the ground floor, see below), with gablets above the arches, and an arched inner doorway; above the cloister each bay is filled by a 3-stage transomed 15-light window with arched top lights and has a small upstand in the parapet, except the centre which has a kneelered gablet containing a clockface; the roof has small triangular dormers in the 2nd and 6th bays, a tall decorated copper-clad fleche on the centre of the ridge, and coped gables. The west end has a 5-sided apse with matching windows, the east end has a large Perpendicular window ; the rear is not of special interest. The interior has panelled walls and a roof of arch-braced collar trusses which carry radiating struts in semicircular arches. The cloisters, which enclose the whole of the north and east sides of the courtyard (forming an emphatic visual bond between the dining hall on one side and the 2 boarding houses on the other) are arcades of 2-centred arches arranged in pairs between buttressed piers, the arches of brick and the central columns of stone with annular caps, with linked hoodmoulds of stone, and a continuous stone-coped parapet carried round; the cloister rises a step at the north-east corner and again between the 2 houses, and on this side (as on the north) it runs into the porches of the houses. These boarding houses are of matching design, cruciform in plan with lateral entrance halls in the centre, 2½ and 3½ storeys and 2:3:2 bays, symmetrical; the centre of each is 3½-storeyed, with buttresses rising to 2nd floor, an open arcade of flattened arches at ground floor, a very narrow 2-storey oriel in the centre with curved glazing in the windows and semi-conical stone cap, cross windows in the flanking bays, an attic window of 5 arched lights under a wide 2-centred arch, side-wall chimneys, and a steeply-pitched roof with a decorated copper niche in the centre; the side ranges each have 2 similar cross-windows at 1st floor and an attic window of 2 arched lights rising into a gabled dormer. Interiors not inspected. The main school building (linked to the houses by the cloister, and forming the south side of the courtyard), has the principal facade to the south: this is U-shaped in plan, 2½ storeys and 5 bays with projecting 5-bay wings, symmetrical. The centre, in the form of a 3-stage gate-tower, has a wide 2-centred-arched moulded doorway at ground door, a stone oriel at 1st floor with curved transomed windows and semi-conical cap, 2 square-headed lancets and a central oculus at 2nd floor, a stone band with corner gargoyles and a flat parapet; otherwise the main range and the wings have transomed windows at ground and 1st floors and gabled half-dormers with arched plate-traceried 2-light windows, and various tall chimneys. The sides and rear are similar in style. History: school founded at St Johns Wood, London, in 1851, and transferred to Leatherhead in 1872; main building gutted by fire 1913, rebuilt 1914.

Listing NGR: TQ1702256683

External Links

• Wikidata Q26485443

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