Lancaster Girls' Grammar School

Lancaster Girls' Grammar School is a girls' grammar school constructed between 1912 and 1914, designed by Henry Littler. It is built in a Free Edwardian Baroque style. The building is constructed of snecked sandstone with ashlar dressings, and has slate roofs. It occupies a double-depth plan with two parallel ridges, and two projecting cross-wings to the front, with a separate, plainer block positioned behind (a later extension from 1994 is not included in the listing).

The school is three storeys high and eleven bays wide. The symmetrical facade is characterised by a recessed central five-bay section flanked by three-bay cross-wings. The ground floor of each cross-wing features two three-light mullioned windows. The first floor has two wide windows with wooden mullions and transoms, featuring 36 panes of glazing, and set beneath relieving arches. The second floor, beneath an open triangular pediment, has a smaller window with a wooden mullion and 12 panes of glazing. Each cross-wing's inner bay contains an octagonal stair turret, lit at the landings by a pair of mullioned windows with a diamond pattern created by lead cames, surmounted by a tall battlemented parapet and an octagonal cupola.

The central recessed section contains the school hall, behind a lower, two-storey block which houses the original entrance and flanking offices. The first-floor entrance is approached by a double flight of steps that run parallel to the front before turning at a right angle to the doorway. These steps are protected by wrought-iron railings with lanterns at the bottom of each flight. The entrance doorway has a round-headed arch with rusticated voussoirs and a heavy keystone, flanked by Ionic columns supporting an open segmental pediment displaying the Borough of Lancaster's coat of arms. To either side of the entrance is a canted bay with a three-light mullioned window, flanked by smaller windows. The five clerestory windows of the hall are visible above, with splayed jambs into which their segmental heads, with rusticated voussoirs, are set. Two pairs of octagonal chimney stacks rise between the first and second, and fourth and fifth, hall windows, framing an octagonal louvre on the hall roof.

The interior of the two-storey hall, accessed through a round-headed doorway with a keystone, is separated from the surrounding corridors on three sides and both levels by square piers. The ceiling features a barrel-vaulted central section supported by curved principal rafters rising from tie beams, which are further supported on strongly-projecting brackets.