Number 2 Lodge At Entrance To Botanic Gardens

Number 2 Lodge at the entrance to the Botanic Gardens in Southport is one of a pair of lodges built around 1876. It is constructed of red brick in Flemish bond with sandstone dressings and features a slate roof adorned with bands of green fishscale slates, designed in the Neo-Jacobean style. The lodge has a modified T-plan, with the main range parallel to the drive on its right-hand side and a service wing at the rear.

The exterior is two storeys high, showcasing a gabled one-window facade facing Botanic Road. It has quoins, a plain sill band on each floor that wraps around, and a steeply-pitched roof with pierced ridge cresting and a coped gable topped with a branched apex finial. The front gable includes a rectangular bay window on the ground floor with cross-casements, a shouldered reveal, a cavetto cornice, and a hipped lead-clad roof. Above this, there is a tall cross-window on the first floor with a stone lintel beneath a stone segmental-pointed relieving arch, and a blind quatrefoil in the gable.

On the facade facing the drive, there is a small five-sided single-storey bay window in the center featuring three narrow sashes, an enriched stone frieze, and a steeply-pitched hipped roof with a fishscale band. A slightly extruded chimney stack is corbelled from the first floor, and to the left, there is one cross-window on each floor, topped by a gablet above the upper window. The service wing mirrors the style of the main lodge and also features a gablet.

The interior has not been inspected. This lodge forms a group with Number 1 Lodge, the associated gate piers and gates between them, and the former Lock-up to the east.