Description

TQ 64 SW PEMBURY LOWER GREEN ROAD

5/382 Pembury County Primary School (Old School) including front boundary wall II

School and former master's house. Circa 1870-1880. Flemish bond red brick with cream and yellow-coloured sandstone dressings and some decorative use of black brick; brick stacks and chimneyshafts; peg-tile roof and cross roofs have crested ridgetiles pierced by trefoils.

Plan: School and former master's house facing east. Relatively large school to left (south) with a 5 or 6-room plan heated by axial stacks. It includes a crosswing which projects forward and back at the left end and a pair of rear wings projecting to rear towards the centre of the whole building. The master's house at the right end has a 3- or 4-room plan with a wing projecting forward next to the school. It has an axial stack backing onto the school.

Most of the school is single storey and the former master's house is 2 storeys.

Exterior: Victorian High Gothic style. Front enriched by horizontal bands of yellow-coloured sandstone sandwiched between courses of black brick. Irregular front fenestration. The school has 5 tall arch-headed windows, 2 with trefoil heads in the gable end of the left crosswing, another with a plain 2-centred arch head alongside in the main block and a pair further right (roughly in the centre of the building). This centre pair are separated from each other and the rest of the building by 3 buttresses. All contain timber windows with Decorated tracery. The tracery contains patterns of coloured leaded glass. All have gables over with plain bargeboards but a late C19/early C20 photograph shows that these were originally collared and the apex filled with open quatrefoils. Either side of the paired windows are square-headed ones and to right the school doorway, a 2-centred arch with internal porch and plain plank door. Above it a gabled half dormer helps balance the school front. The former master's house wing has a projecting 2- storey bay containing square-headed mullioned windows and a monopitch roof over a cornice of shaped brick. Set back to right is a 2-bay arcade; a column with stiff leaf capital and 2-centred arches in front of a recessed porch and plain plank door. Half dormer above with hipped roof and finial (other finials around the school on early photographs). Plainer style round the other sides of the house and school. Early photographs also show a spire-like belfry on the ridge of the tall school roof.

Interior: Not inspected.

A narrow strip of ground in front of the school is bounded by the original low brick wall with shaped brick coping. It has square gate posts and pyramid caps.

Sources Mary Standen. Pembury in the Past (1984) Old photographs of the school are reproduced on pages 25 and 26.

Listing NGR: TQ6285841702

External Links

• Wikidata Q26552261

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