Elm Street School (County Primary School)

MIDDLETON ELM STREET SD 80 NE (west side) 2/7 Elm Street School (County Primary 19/9/69 School) - II* School. 1908-10. By Edgar Wood and J. Henry Sellers. Brick with stone dressings and concrete roofs. 9-bay hall with towers at either end forms the centre of the design. Cloisters extend forward to meet Elm Street at left and right (boys and girls) and enclose a formally planned garden and a suite of offices which have a concaved single-storey facade. Beyond the arms of cloisters are parallel ranges of classrooms and a long range adjoins the hall at the rear. The design is compactly planned along formal lines. The hall has 9 round-arched windows with impost blocks and keystones to front and rear. The hipped roof sits behind a coped parapet which steps above a recessed brick panel in each bay, a feature which is repeated elsewhere. Towers to left and right with stone top stages form dominant features. The cross-vaulted cloisters have entrances on Elm Street with rusticated segmental arches and banded corner pilasters.Some of the arches have been blocked and only one set of cast- iron gates remains. The concaved office front has a series of flat-faced stone mullion windows (many leaded casements have been removed) on either side of central double doors. The classroom ranges to either side and to the rear (of 6 and 21 bays respectively) have segmental-arched windows with stone sills and are articulated by advanced bays which have a higher parapet level. Small later additions to left and right. Interior: many original features survive including doors and a moulded plaster ceiling to the hall. The school was designed to established new standards of hygiene in educaton and was the first municipal school (along with Durnford Street School, q.v.) in Middleton. The building is technically and architecturally advanced, the use of reinforced concrete allowing more freedom of planning. J.H.G. Archer, "Edgar Wood (1860-1935)" Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, vol. 73-4, 1963-4.

Listing NGR: SD8838205948