Numbers 13-23 With Attached Boundary Wall

Block of seven town houses on Swinley Lane, Wigan, built in 1897 and designed by WEV Crompton, a local architect who later achieved success in London and the Home Counties. The block is largely unaltered, though some modifications have been made.

The buildings are constructed primarily in red brick laid in Flemish bond with terracotta dressings. Some sections incorporate close-studded timber-framing and render. The roofs are slate with red ridge tiles. The design employs a "Free style" combining 16th-century vernacular and Queen Anne elements, successfully disguising the conventional 19th-century double-depth plan with single fronts and back extensions.

The range of fourteen windows extends across two and a half storeys over cellars. The design creates the impression of early 18th-century alterations to a 16th-century timber-framed range. Numbers 19 and 21 are designed to appear as a timber-framed hall-range, while Numbers 17 and 23 read as added or remodelled cross-wings. Numbers 13 and 15 to the left combine elements suggesting both implied building periods. Number 39 Walkden Avenue East forms an addition at the right-hand end.

Number 13 features a pentagonal two-storey flat-roofed oriel at the corner with 12-pane sashed windows on both floors. An extruded chimney stack abuts this with offsets at first floor and tapers above eaves level. The left return wall contains a two-and-a-half-storey gabled bay with close-studding at first floor and attic level; the attic is jettied and contains a 3-light small-paned casement.

Number 15 has a two-and-a-half-storey gabled facade with a small canted bay window at ground floor, a 2-light window above, and a jettied gable with studding containing a 3-light casement. These windows now have 20th-century UPVC glazing.

Numbers 17 and 23 are in Queen Anne style, brick-built, two and a half storeys high, with gable copings and kneelers featuring ball finials. They have 12-pane sashed windows with exposed boxes and flat-arched heads with terracotta keystones—two at ground floor and three at first floor for Number 17, and a coupled pair at ground floor with two pairs at first floor for Number 23. Both have Venetian windows to the attics, small-paned at Number 23 but altered at Number 17.

Numbers 19 and 21 have tripartite sashed windows at ground floor under a monopitched roof. The set-back first floor is studded with 2-light casements in the centre and splayed 3-light sashed oriel windows in the angles to left and right. All these windows are small-paned. Wide cyma-shaped eyebrow dormers occupy the roof.

Number 39 Walkden Avenue East is set back and built in Queen Anne style, with brick and pebble-dashed render at first floor. It has a set-back two-storey porch under a carried-down roof. The 12-pane sashed windows are interrupted by a rectangular bay window set diagonally through the right-hand corner at ground floor. The right-hand return wall features a rectangular two-storey bay window breaking the eaves, with tripartite small-paned windows on both floors—sashed at ground floor, fixed at first floor but with opening panes in each light except the centre, which has 20th-century joinery.

All properties have square-headed doorways. All except Numbers 19 and 21 feature flat-arched heads and keystones. All except Number 15, which is UPVC, retain 3-pane overlights with moulded wooden surrounds and lintels, and fielded-panel doors. Those at Numbers 17 and 21 incorporate stained glass in the upper portions. Rear-access lobbies between Numbers 15 and 17, and Numbers 19 and 21, have moulded surrounds and barred gates. The roof features oversailing eaves on slender iron brackets. Chimneys are tapered and corniced.

At the rear, back-extensions are mostly coupled under carried-down roofs with tall multiple-flue chimney stacks rising through them.

The interiors were not inspected except for Number 39 Walkden Avenue East, which retains many original architect-designed features and fittings including the staircase, fireplaces, and door furnishings.

The properties are bounded by a brick boundary wall with moulded terracotta coping, approximately one metre high with rectangular piers. The returned sides ramp up to the rear wall.