Royal Victoria School For The Blind

The Royal Victoria School for the Blind is a house, dating from 1865, designed by Alfred Waterhouse for Dr. Thomas Hodgkin. Constructed of hammer-dressed snecked sandstone with an ashlar plinth and dressings, the building has a graduated dark slate roof with serrated ridge tiles and stone gable copings. It is situated on Benwell Lane in Newcastle upon Tyne.

The building is of irregular plan and executed in a Tudor-Gothic style. It is two storeys and attics high, with an entrance front of six bays. One bay is at left and two are at right, gabled and projecting to form a range around a courtyard. Two bays are set back at left, and four extend to the right from the gabled end of the right wing. A two-storey porch at the left of the courtyard contains a boarded door. A loggia, now glazed, is located in the inner right return, featuring two paired openings with central octagonal columns, cushion capitals, and low walls, except in the right entrance bay, which has a panelled door with etched glazing under a two-centred arch. The windows are mostly sashes with flat stone lintels, alternate-block jambs with shouldered chamfers, and sloping sills. The left projection has rounded ground floor corners corbelled out to the first floor, with a continuous string above. Above this string are three elliptical-headed niches containing low-relief coats of arms. The central section has three high-gabled dormers with bargeboards and clove finials. Numerous ashlar-coped ridge chimneys are present with buttresses and square yellow pots.

The interior features a geometric-patterned tiled entrance hall and a dog-leg stair with a pierced balustrade and grip handrail. The stair window glass depicts the coats of arms of Middlesex, Newcastle, and Cornwall, along with the initials ‘TH’ and ‘LAH’ and the date 1865. A Gothic cast-iron radiator cover is located in the hall.

Historically, Hodgkin was a local historian who gifted the house to the Royal Victoria Home in 1894, also donating the grounds to the Urban District of Benwell for a public park.