King James I Academy

King James I Academy, Middle Building

This building, dated 1910, was formerly known as Bishop Auckland Girls' Grammar School. It is constructed of snecked stone with horizontal tooling to ashlar plinth, quoins and dressings, with a Lakeland slate roof featuring stone copings and wood lanterns.

The building follows an E-plan arrangement with a large east wing containing the hall. Designed in the Free Jacobean style, it comprises two-storey classroom and office blocks (three windows wide), one-storey connecting links, and a hall rising to one high storey with seven windows.

The south elevation faces the drive. The east block features a projecting pedimented centre with rusticated pilaster strips supporting an open pediment and a round-headed window over a porch. The porch has double panelled doors, wide keyed open arches to the sides, and a plain lintel at the front where a former roof linked with a similar porch on the toilet block opposite, forming a covered walk. The porch has a hipped roof. The flanking bays contain three-light windows with stone mullions and ground-floor transoms, a first-floor band, and a top cornice.

The stair and library wing is set back to the left, featuring two lower storeys with quoins and bands at ground-floor lintel, first-floor and eaves levels. It has mullioned windows and a top parapet with flat stone coping on plain balusters set above a scooped link to corner pilasters.

The central classroom and office block is framed by giant pilasters defining bays, with the central bay featuring an open pediment and four-light mullioned windows with transoms on the ground floor, a first-floor band, and a top cornice. A stair wing is set back at the left, similar to the corresponding stair near the east end.

The west wing has a three-light mullion and transom window set at the right of the long wall, with quoins and top cornice. Rainwater heads are dated 1910.

The roof features tall ridge ventilators over the hall, laboratory and library. Open ogee arches are set under a pyramid roof over the library, with an ogee dome over the hall and laboratory, the latter fitted with louvres. A tall boiler house chimney stands to the rear east of the central block, formed as a square stone tower with tapered pilasters flanking an arched top stage, a pronounced batter, and swept low-pitched coping. The west wing has corniced ashlar chimneys.

The rear courtyard elevation shows the hall wing breaking forward at the left with high windows set in bays defined by wide pilasters and a ramped parapet. Four gabled classrooms occupy the aisles to the hall. At the hall end stands a two-storey gabled wing with an impost band to a high Diocletian window over the ground floor, with a small two-light window below. The central two-storey gabled laboratory projection has two-light windows flanking a three-light central panel, the upper with a round head and dripstring below a large carved coat of arms of Durham County Council. A one-storey block stands at the right. Linking corridors have elliptical stone arches over doors with plain stone surrounds; the left corridor bears the inscription GIRLS. Mullioned windows light these corridors.

Inside, a plaque in the vestibule commemorates the opening by Mrs Walter Runciman on 5 October 1910. It bears the motto NON SIBI SED ALIIS / BISHOP AUCKLAND GIRLS COUNTY SCHOOL and the initials DCC (Durham County Council). Brown faience dado runs throughout the corridors and stairwells. The hall features half-glazed screens to the flanking classrooms, arcaded end upper galleries now glazed, and a queen post roof on carved corbelled braces.