Victoria House

Victoria House, formerly the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children, was built in 1890 and is by S Musgrave. It is a red brick building with ashlar dressings and slate roofs, designed in the Gothic Revival style. The building has a plinth, sill bands, a string course, and corbelled eaves. It has two storeys and a seven-window front. Most windows are lancets with double transoms to the first floor and single transoms and cusped heads on the ground floor.

The central entrance bay projects forward and is flanked by two-stage buttresses topped with shafts and panelled pinnacles with spires. A crocketed coped gable with a finial and band inscribed “Victoria” tops the entrance, with a graduated triple lancet window above. A pointed-arched recess with shafts and a hoodmould contains a triple lancet with plate tracery on the first floor, above a pointed-arched doorway with shafts, roundels, a hoodmould, half-glazed Tudor arched double doors, a stone traceried fanlight, and an inscribed label.

The flanking ranges have a central bay defined by canted pilasters topped with pinnacles and a coped gable. A tall recess with a hoodmould containing a double lancet with blind tracery stands between the pilasters, and below that a double lancet. Double lancet windows are present on each floor to either side.

A square corner tower, three stages high, rises to the right, with string courses, a corbel table, and a pyramidal roof. The first floor of the tower has two transomed single lancets on each side, above which are two narrow slits on each side. A moulded pointed-arched doorway with a hoodmould and wrought-iron gate are at the base of the tower, above which is an arcade with three cusped openings and round shafts. The right return displays the projecting ends of two gabled wings.