Durham School South Building, Frontage Building And Gateway

The Durham School South Building, Frontage Building, and Gateway are school buildings constructed between 1843 and 1844 by architects Salvin and Pickering, incorporating an earlier house. The Frontage Building was built slightly later, while the Gateway was added in 1927 as a memorial to Graham Campbell Kerr. The structures are made of roughly-coursed squared sandstone with ashlar dressings in the older parts, and hammer-dressed squared stone in the later parts, featuring Welsh slate roofs with stone copings and stacks, as well as a leaded belfry spire, all designed in a modified Gothic style.

The South Building, located on the left, has two storeys and five gabled bays, with the two bays on the right projecting. There is a small Tudor-arched door to the right of the third bay. The building features two-light mullioned-and-transomed windows, with those on the ground floor set under a continuous drip string that forms hoodmoulds above the two right windows, and 4-centred relieving arches above. The first-floor left windows are in half-dormer gables, except for one small window to the left of the third bay and round small lights in the peaks of the right gables. The building has a coped plinth, alternating quoins, and large square gable footstones. The left return shows ground-floor windows set in raised ashlar panels.

The Frontage Building has two storeys and five irregular gabled bays, with a large buttress on the left. In the left bay, there is a large projecting entrance with a two-centred arch that is double-chamfered and features carved spandrels. Above the entrance is a band of heraldic panels. The building also has mullioned-and-transomed windows, with the upper ones having geometric traceried heads. To the right of the entrance is a small extruded octagonal belfry tower with cusped louvred bell-openings in the drum and a swept spire. The gables contain small openings or tracery panels, and the third bay projects with a taller gable topped with a cresset finial, while roll finials are found elsewhere.

The Gateway consists of a triple screen with a large double-chamfered, two-centred central carriage archway, flanked by pedestrian entrances that have flattened Tudor-arched heads under hoodmoulds. The screen wall features rolled coping that steps up to a low central gable.