The Lightfoot Institute

The Lightfoot Institute is a building founded as a Young Men’s Church Institute and named after Bishop Lightfoot. Designed by Robert Wilkinson Thompson in a plain simple Jacobean style, it opened in 1882. The structure is made of dressed sandstone and features tall pointed gables, pitched slate roofs, and stone mullioned windows. It served as the town’s library until the 1990s and later as a multipurpose community space before being redeveloped into apartments in 2021.

The building has two storeys and a layout of 1:2:1 bays. The wide six-panel door, set back in a roll-moulded surround in the third bay, has a three-pane overlight with stone mullions. There are ballflower stops to the stepped label mould over the door, along with eroded carved arms of Bishop Lightfoot. The tall two-light stone cross mullion windows are prominent, and there are louvred slit vents in the high gables of the end bays. The roll-moulded gable coping rests on moulded kneelers, and the corbelled eaves gutter supports a steeply pitched roof that features ridge cresting, tall corniced chimneys rising from the right return eaves, and a central octagonal ridge lantern with small lucarnes, pierced vent panels, and a lead spirelet.