Gascoigne Almshouses And Attached Wardens Cottage

PARLINGTON MAIN STREET SE43NW LS25 (west side)Aberford 2/75 Gascoigne Almshouses and attached warden's 4.7.52 cottage (Formerly listed as Gascoigne Almshouses and lodge)

GV II*

Almshouses and warden's cottage, now local Authority Museums Service workshop. 1843-5, by George Fowler Jones, for Mary and Elizabeth Gascoigne. Limestone ashlar, slate roofs. Linear plan:a range of eight 2-storey single-cell lodgings divided into 2 groups of 4 by a central entrance hall with tower, served by a rear cloister-corridor, and with projecting gabled wings (chapel and refectory). Gothic style, with buttresses, octagonal turrets and pinnacles with crosses, 4-centred arched windows under hoodmoulds with figured stops. All elements separately gabled (except tower), with intermediate buttresses terminating in pinnacles which have brattished cornices and ogee caps; each lodging has a 2-light window at ground floor and a single-light window above; central tower has a 4-centred arched doorway, a lettered tripartite panel above this surrounded by a square hoodmould with returned ends carried round as a dripband, next a band of quatrefoils containing blank shields, then a 2-light window with Perpendicular tracery, flanked by niches with elaborately-carved semi-octagonal canopies, a circular clockface to the top stage, an embattled parapet with corner pinnacles and central pinnacle rising from a carved bird. Each wing has a large transomed 4-light window with traceried head and hoodmould with figured stops. Roofs steeply pitched with transverse ridges. Return walls have three 2-light windows and battlements with raised cops in the centre displaying shields and banners and carved emblems of the Gascoigne family. Rear: flat-roofed enclosed cloister has rectangular windows and a central door, upper floor of main range has narrow rectangular windows with chamfered surrounds, lancets in the gables above; attached at north end, a 2-storey warden's cottage in simpler style, with pyramidal roof. Interior: in entrance hall, lettered tablets flanking the door, that on the left listing the trustees, and the other stating that the building was begun "Sep AD 1843 and finished May 10 1845", with names "Geo Fowler Jones Archt York, Thos White Clerk of the Works"; over rear door a 3-light stained glass window depicting a lady in the centre dispensing loaves from a basket, an old man to the left and an old woman to the right (other stained glass in similar style in wings, removed for storage); upper rooms of lodgings linked in pairs by connecting doors for mutual supervision of inmates.

Listing NGR: SE4323636375