Gascoigne Almshouses And Attached Wardens Cottage

The Gascoigne Almshouses and attached Warden's Cottage, now used as a local authority museums service workshop, were built between 1843 and 1845 by George Fowler Jones for Mary and Elizabeth Gascoigne. The building is constructed of limestone ashlar with slate roofs.

The complex has a linear plan, composed of eight two-storey single-cell lodgings divided into two groups of four by a central entrance hall with a tower. A rear cloister-corridor serves the lodgings, and projecting gabled wings house a chapel and a refectory. The design is in the Gothic style, featuring buttresses, octagonal turrets and pinnacles with crosses, and four-centred arched windows with hoodmoulds incorporating figured stops. Each element is separately gabled, with intermediate buttresses terminating in pinnacles that have brattished cornices and ogee caps. Each lodging has a two-light window on the ground floor and a single-light window above. The central tower features a four-centred arched doorway, a lettered tripartite panel above it surrounded by a square hoodmould with returned ends carried round as a dripband, a band of quatrefoils containing blank shields, a two-light window with Perpendicular tracery, flanked by niches with elaborately-carved semi-octagonal canopies, a circular clock face at the top stage, and an embattled parapet with corner pinnacles and a central pinnacle rising from a carved bird. The wings have large transomed four-light windows with traceried heads and hoodmoulds with figured stops. The roofs are steeply pitched with transverse ridges.

The return walls incorporate three two-light windows and battlements with raised cops displaying shields and banners and carved emblems of the Gascoigne family. The rear cloister has a flat roof with rectangular windows, and the upper floor of the main range has narrow rectangular windows with chamfered surrounds and lancets in the gables. Attached at the north end is a two-storey warden's cottage with a pyramidal roof, in a simpler style.

Inside, the entrance hall features lettered tablets flanking the door: one listing the trustees, and the other stating the building was begun in September 1843 and finished May 10 1845, naming George Fowler Jones as architect and Thomas White as Clerk of the Works. A three-light stained glass window above the rear door depicts a lady dispensing loaves, an old man, and an old woman. Similar stained glass windows are found in the wings, and are currently stored. Upper rooms of the lodgings are linked in pairs by connecting doors designed for mutual supervision of the inmates.