Thornleigh House

Thornleigh House is a large house, built in 1868 and with alterations around 1890, originally designed by Henry Stead for Arthur Lemuel Briggs, a cotton magnate. It is now used by a Salesian Community. The house is constructed of brick with stone dressings and a slate roof.

The main entrance front is two storeys high and long, with the principal rooms arranged along its length, accessed from an entrance hall and a rear corridor. The entrance is located towards the left and features a porch with bulbous shafts leading to an arched door. The spandrels of the arch are decorated with low-relief stone cupids. A balustraded parapet extends over a single-storey extension to the left, which houses a dining room with leaded lights on either side of a truncated stack. To the right of the doorway, there is an advanced two-window range with angle pilasters and paired three-light mullioned and transomed windows with leaded lights to the ground floor, and two-pane sash windows above within stone architraves. A balustraded parapet tops this section. A further two-window range is set back to the right, also with two-pane sash windows in stone architraves on each floor, and beyond this is an advanced bay (now the library) with a squared bay window on the ground floor and four windows above with stone architraves featuring segmental and triangular pedimented heads. A balustraded parapet extends across this section, with a central segmentally pedimented panel displaying a coat of arms in low relief. The garden front features two gables divided by a narrow single-window range. An advanced right-hand gable has a full-height bow window. The windows have stilted arched brick heads, with corbelled brickwork in the gable apex and dentilled brick string courses. A rear service wing is present, exhibiting a style different from the entrance front, suggesting an earlier phase of construction.

The interior retains its original layout, and many rooms feature a rich late 19th-century decorative scheme. This includes the entrance hall with wall panelling, a gilded frieze, ornate low-relief timber piers forming an arcade, and an inglenook fireplace with a pent roof and a copper fire hood. Similar inglenook fireplaces are also found in the library and the dining room.

The house was originally built as a private residence and was later acquired by the Higher Education Committee of the Borough of Bolton in 1907 for use as a hostel, before being bought by the Salesians in 1923.