York College For Girls

This is a large house, dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, with significant additions from 1743. It has been altered over time and is now partly shops and partly a school.

The front block was built in 1743 and is of painted rendered brick with a timber colonnade and cornice. The left return is of orange-brown brick in English garden-wall bond. The rear wings are timber-framed with rendered infill. The roofs are tiled or pantiled, with brick coping and brick stacks, some of which have been truncated.

The front of the building has three storeys and an attic, with a five-bay facade. The ground floor features modern plate glass shopfronts behind a tetrastyle in antis colonnade. The first and second floors have 12-pane sash windows. A moulded modillioned eaves cornice runs along the top, returning at each end with a rainwater head dated 1743, initialled JR, and a fall pipe on rosette clamps. There are two pedimented dormer windows with two-light casements in the attic. The rear features three gabled wings with exposed timber framing. Most of the rear windows are modern timber mullioned. A blocked timber mullion window is visible in the gable end of the central wing. A canted oriel window with a 12-pane sash, flanked by 8-pane sashes, is located on the second floor of the right wing. In the return of the central wing is a six-panel door beneath a vestigial bressumer carved with vine trails, and a round-arched sash window above. A two-light four-pane Yorkshire sash window is found on the second floor.

Inside the front block's first floor, a fireplace with a dentilled cornice shelf is in the right front room, and a moulded cornice in the left front room. The second floor features a close string staircase to the attics, with column-on-vase balusters, square newels and a flat moulded handrail. The right front room has a painted stone bolection-moulded fireplace. Two- and three-panel doors are found throughout. The central wing contains an open well staircase to the second floor, which is plastered and panelled. This staircase has a moulded close string, bulbous balusters, panelled newels with ball and pedestal finials, a heavy moulded handrail, and a carved foliate volute at the base of the bottom newel. A doorcase at the foot of the stairs has a pulvinated frieze, cornice, and a door of six raised and fielded panels. In the left wing, a ground floor room has a moulded brick fireplace with a flattened elliptical arch and shallow arched recesses above.