Gildersome Quaker Meeting House, including gatehouse range, cottage and boundary wall

Gildersome Quaker Meeting House

This complex comprises a Quaker meeting house built in 1756, a cottage of around 1804, and a gatehouse range of 1849. All three elements are constructed primarily of coursed millstone grit, though the cottage is of mellow red brick. The roof coverings include replacement artificial-stone slate on the meeting house, Welsh slate on the cottage, and original stone-slate on the gatehouse range. The complex sits on the east side of Street Lane, bounded by Gildersome Primary School grounds to the north and east, with a burial ground immediately east of the meeting house.

The gatehouse range forms the main entrance alongside Street Lane. It is a two-storey structure with an arched carriageway entrance at ground level and a three-over-six sash window to the first floor with wedge lintels on both sides. A four-panel door on the south inside wall of the carriageway provides access to the first-floor former groom's room. Projecting northward from the gatehouse, alongside Street Lane, is the former coach house and stables, a single-storey building with no openings facing Street Lane. On the east side, a large entrance opening has been partly altered to accommodate a modern garage door and window with door to an adjoining conservatory. At the northern end of the east elevation is a doorway accessing the stables with an adjacent window now fitted with replaced uPVC glazing.

The cottage projects at right angles from the northern end of the gatehouse range. Constructed of mellow red brick with a Welsh slate roof and tall brick ridge stack at its east gable end, it contrasts with the other site buildings. Its front elevation is now largely obscured by a late-twentieth-century conservatory (not included in the listing), though original door and window openings survive with replaced twentieth-century casement glazing and glazed double doors. The rear north elevation features a rendered lean-to outshut with windows having deep chamfered sills and replacement uPVC glazing. An engineered-brick wall projects eastward from the cottage's east end, bridging the gap to the meeting house and incorporating a pedestrian gateway to a small private garden and the meeting house's outside toilet.

The meeting house is single-storey and four bays long, with a short ridge stack at its west gable end. Its principal south elevation is of ashlar and rises from a stone plinth, incorporating four two-over-two sash windows with integral lintels and slightly projecting sills. The western-end window is flanked by two doorways with tie-stone jambs: the left doorway, with a four-panel split-opening door, leads to the former school room, whilst the right doorway, with a six-panel door, leads to the meeting room. The remainder of the building is of coursed millstone grit, though the north elevation and west gable end are now rendered and the east gable end is whitewashed. The pitched roof has timber guttering supported on carved stone corbels, with replaced artificial-stone slate coverings and uPVC downpipes. The north elevation contains two windows in the same style as those to the front, and at the east end sits a small rendered lean-to containing toilets with separate male and female access doorways at each end.

The entire site is enclosed to the north, east and south, including the burial ground, by a tall millstone-grit boundary wall topped with rounded copings. The wall is primarily coursed stone but incorporates crazy-paving sections on the north side and incorporates a blocked-up arched pedestrian gateway that originally served the cottage. The north-west corner rises above the rest of the wall with a shaped domed cap in the style of a gate pier.

Interior

The meeting house is internally subdivided into two spaces: the meeting room and a small former school room at the west end. The meeting room has a floorboard floor with a central stone slab (now covered by a carpet runner) that formerly held a stove. A later inserted panelled vestibule lined with coat hooks stands just inside the entrance. Tongue and groove panelled dado runs around the room's north, east and south walls, incorporating a raised Elders' platform at the east end with two tiers of bench seating. A panelled screen with a central doorway separates the two rooms; the lower part of this screen is hinged and incorporates further coat hooks on the meeting room side, and can be raised to fasten onto long cast-iron hooks hanging from the school room ceiling.

The former school room has plain dado topped by moulded cornice and a chimneybreast to the west wall with later fire surround and tiled insert. To the right of the chimneybreast is a built-in cupboard, and to the left is a row of coat hooks adjacent to the external school room door. A flip-down shelf attached to the dividing screen would have served as a desk, with built-in ink wells in its ledge. A modern kitchenette has been inserted along the north wall. The school room contains two seventeenth-century gravestones dating to the 1660s, formerly attached to the south elevation and brought from the earlier graveyard and meeting house.

The gatehouse contains a steep narrow timber stair flight leading to a first-floor room with floorboard floor and chimneybreast to the north wall, the fireplace now removed. The coach house has partly whitewashed walls, lath and plaster ceiling with loft hatch opening, and concrete floor, divided from the stables by a brick wall with internal window and plank-and-batten door. The stables retain a stone-flag and stone-sett floor with original timber stall dividers, hay rack and cast-iron tethering rings.