St Cuthbert's clergy house

The building is a clergy house dating to 1883, designed by Hugh Roumieu Gough. It is constructed of red brick with Bath stone dressings and a slate roof. The house is situated on a compact L-shaped plan, enclosing the north-west angle of the church, and extends over three storeys with a half-basement. The ground floor includes a broad entrance porch, providing access to both the house and the church; a large drawing room faces the street alongside the porch, and a dining room and study are located behind, with bedrooms on the upper floors. A small oratory, accessible via a closet on the first floor, overlooks the church’s south aisle, and a narrow staircase connects the second floor to the west gallery of the nave.

The exterior presents a tall, narrow facade, angled slightly to the church, facing onto a side street now known as Philbeach Gardens, previously named Cluny Mews. The street elevation is markedly asymmetrical, employing a free domestic Gothic style with two- and three-light casement windows featuring trefoiled heads and brick or stone mullions. The projecting bay on the left has a flat roof and a decorated parapet, containing the porch, which is framed by a Gothic-arched stone surround with angle-shafts. A stone cross dedicated to St Cuthbert is incorporated into the brickwork above the porch; a similar cross below and to the right of the entrance marks the foundation stone, dated June 2nd 1883. The hip-roofed bay on the right houses the drawing room and principal bedrooms; the upper two floors project slightly as an oriel, with patterned brickwork filling the tympanum above the second-floor window.

The interiors remain largely unaltered. Most rooms retain fireplaces, some with plain marble surrounds and decorative cast-iron grates, along with four-panel doors, skirtings, and dado rails. The staircase has a simple timber balustrade with closely spaced turned uprights. The inner door to the porch features decorative strapwork hinges and a lion-headed door knocker, which is a copy of the sanctuary knocker from Durham Cathedral.

Buildings associated with Philbeach Hall, designed by Gough in 1894 but significantly rebuilt in the 1950s, stand alongside the clergy house and now form No. 51 Philbeach Gardens. These buildings are not considered to be of special interest and are excluded from the listing.