Priors Hill

Priors Hill is a house built in 1901 by H M Fletcher for Mrs. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, with additions made before 1914 by Horace Field. The building features rendered and colourwashed brick with machine tiled roofs and has an irregular T-plan. It is one storey with a dormer attic, and there is a 2-storey eccentric block to the north of the entrance front. All windows are casements, and the east elevation includes a central glazed door. There is a lower balancing wing to the south with a gable facing the road at right angles to the north block, featuring one 3-light casement on each floor, a gabled roof, and a roughcast stack on the south roof slope. Between the two blocks is a single-storey flat-roofed link with an entrance door flanked by two 2-light casements. Behind is the gabled roof of the stem of the T, which has one flat-topped dormer fitted with 2-light casements on either side of a tapering roughcast stack on the front roof slope, along with a further dormer to the right. The garden elevations also feature casements, and the north wing is terminated in a bulbous extension to the west.

Inside, the principal reception room to the west has large-framed panelling and a bolection-moulded chimney-piece, with a barrel-vaulted and plastered ceiling. The west spandrels of the ceiling feature two plaster lunettes depicting a 17th-century galleon in high relief and the early 20th-century passenger liner 'Ophir' of the Orient Line. The hall passageway has a plaster groin vault, and there is a closed-string staircase with lattice balusters.

Historically, the original building was designed as an extension to a house opposite called Westhill and included a billiard room, stables, a coach house, and servants' quarters. Mrs. Garrett Anderson intended it to be converted into a house for her son, which was completed before 1914. The stables and coach house were filled in, and a wing was added to the east to contain three rooms and a front hall.