20,21, Winckley Square

This is a large town house, likely built in the early 1820s. It was later divided into two separate houses, then used as a convent school, and is now offices. The building was extended and altered in the 1850s, and has undergone further alterations since. Constructed of red brick in a Flemish bond pattern, it features sandstone dressings and a slate roof. The design is based on a double-depth, double-fronted plan, with a narrow addition to the right-hand side.

The building is three stories high, with a basement, and has five bays, except for the one-bay addition originally comprising No.21. The symmetrical facade features an ashlar plinth, a first-floor band, a plain frieze, and a moulded cornice with a lead-clad blocking course. The central doorway, accessed by five wide steps with nosings, has an elliptical arched opening with an extrados of gauged brick, flanked by slender, set-in Tuscan columns. It features a moulded stone architrave with a keystone, imposts and lintel, a plain fanlight above the lintel, and a six-panel door where the top panels are glazed. The windows are sash windows without glazing bars, with raised sills and wedge lintels. The basement has two windows on each side of the steps, protected by replacement cast-iron railings which extend across the addition to the right, including a gate at that end. There are two chimneys on the front slope of the roof.

The addition (No.21), set back slightly, has a former doorway that has been altered into a window. This doorway retains an architrave with engaged columns featuring Egyptian capitals and a dentilled cornice, along with windows that have moulded architraves resting on small consoles.

The interior includes moulded plaster cornices (featuring egg-and-dart details), a marble fireplace in the front left ground-floor room, and another on the first floor with fluted colonettes. A grand open-well staircase rises the full height of the building, with scrolled brackets, stick balusters, and a wreathed mahogany handrail.

Historically, No.21 was created as an addition, and was apparently built for Edward Garlick, a partner in the firm of Garlick, Park and Sykes, surveyors and architects responsible for works such as Preston Dock and Blackpool Promenade. The entire building was later part of the former Holy Child Convent School for Girls.