Didsbury Public Library

Didsbury Public Library is a public library built in 1915 by Henry Price, the City Architect. It features red brick construction with Portland stone dressings and slate roofs. The building has a triangular plan with two wings set at an acute angle, hinged on an octagonal drum, with the space between the wings filled by a hall. It showcases an eclectic style with Gothic elements and is a high single storey structure dominated by the drum. The drum rises to a clerestory and includes coupled corner pilasters, three-light mullioned windows with cusped tracery and hoodmoulds, a prominent sill-band around the building, a deep stone parapet with upstands on each side, and an octahedral roof topped with a finial and weathervane. The front of the library, facing northeast, is enclosed by a single-storey, three-sided porch designed as a buttressed arcade with two-centred arches, an embattled parapet, and a pyramidal roof. The parapet also features angled side-lobbies on both sides. The wings of the library have mullioned and double-transomed windows that rise into gablets above the parapet, and they are capped with hipped roofs.