Captain Cook School And School House

Captain Cook School and School House is a parochial school and school house built in 1849-1850 by R.C. Carpenter from London. The infants' room and rear porch were added in 1884. Since 1961, the building has been used as a private house and nursery school. It features dressed sandstone with a chamfered plinth and a brick north gable for the infants' room, topped with Welsh slate roofs. The design is in the Tudor Gothic style, comprising a two-storey school house and a one-storey porch and school, arranged in three asymmetrical bays.

A lower central gabled porch connects the house and school, featuring boarded double doors within a moulded Tudor-arched surround, enriched spandrels, and a hoodmould, above which is a projecting niche with an enriched corbel and a spirelet. The left side of the school house has a canted bay window with chamfered-mullioned cusped-headed lights, iron casements, and leaded glazing, along with a similar single light on the ground floor to the right. The building has a shallow parapet with chamfered and roll-moulded copings and a corniced, projecting offset stack at the left end, topped with a hipped roof.

The right gable-fronted school features a 4-centred-headed window with rectilinear tracery beneath a hoodmould, though the finial is missing. The right return facing The Grove has three square-headed windows with similar tracery set between offset buttresses. A truncated wood bellcote with louvres is located at the west end of the ridge, and a zinc ridge-vent with a conical roof is at the east end. The rear of the school displays a similar 4-centred-headed window, a gabled infants' room, and a lean-to porch situated between the school and the main porch.

Inside, the school roof features arch-braced collar-beam trusses and through-purlins. An inscribed slate tablet dated 1812 commemorates Captain James Cook, R.N., F.R.S., and is located on the north wall of the school, originally from the Church of St. Cuthbert. An inscribed marble tablet in the infants' room notes its construction in 1884. The building was constructed using stone from Marton Lodge, which was built in 1790 and destroyed by fire around 1832.