Trowse Primary School

Trowse Primary School

A late 19th-century Board School, originally housed in a Congregational Chapel school room and enlarged in 1882 with a purpose-built extension designed by the Norwich-based architect Edward Boardman, funded by the industrialist J.J. Colman.

The buildings are constructed of red brick with moulded brick and terracotta dressings. A small section of split flint walling survives at the north end of the former chapel school room building, now housing toilets. The buildings have slate roof coverings.

The layout is accretional, with the earlier chapel school room and service rooms forming the northern section and the 1882 extension to the south. The overall plan is linear, though the extension exemplifies a central hall plan with flanking small rooms to the east and west.

The former chapel school room is aligned east-west and plainly detailed, with tall, wide gables incorporating paired tall window openings with 20th-century multi-pane frames below segmental-arched heads. Each gable apex has a circular window with a 21st-century multifoil frame. At the north end is an attached single-storey lean-to section; its north wall retains two lancet windows with linked hood moulds set within an area of flint walling.

The 1882 extension is more ornately detailed, comprising a five-bay, single-storey, multi-gabled entrance front to the rear of which rises a taller central hall. Three-light mullion and mullion-and-transom windows form a clerestory band set beneath dentilled eaves, lighting the entrance lobbies and former boys' and girls' cloakroom areas. At the south end is a lower single-storey service building extending to the school boundary wall.

The frontage comprises five gabled bays, the northernmost incorporating the entrance doorway with a four-centred arched head and moulded brick surround; a moulded string course forms hood moulds above the door and flanking single-light windows. The remaining gables each have a single two-light mullion-and-transom window set beneath a hood mould. Each gablet apex incorporates a small blind terracotta panel; between each bay is a cast-iron downpipe with butterfly brackets and decorative hopper head.

The rear elevation is similarly detailed but incorporates an access doorway to a cellar, formerly the school's boiler room.

The interior of the former chapel school room and associated service areas is much altered but retains exposed roof trusses of composite design with timber principal rafters and metal tension rods with ornamental struts completing the truss triangulations. The principal areas retain vertically-boarded wainscotting.

The interior of the 1882 extension has also undergone alteration, notably by the insertion of a mezzanine floor and access stairs at the south end of the central hall. Many original features remain, including the surround to the main hearth, panelled doors, vertically-boarded wainscotting, and what appear to be small heating or ventilator columns in each of the small classrooms flanking the central hall. The interior of the hipped roof structure is underboarded, with curved arched braces with open spandrel brackets rising from corbels in both end and side walls to support the principal rafters.