Gate Lodge And Gateway To The Former Convent Of The Holy Child Jesus

Gate Lodge and Gateway to the Former Convent of the Holy Child Jesus

A former school and attached entrance arch, both in Gothic style. The foundation stone for the school was laid in 1849 and the entrance arch was built in 1850. Both were designed by William Wilkinson Wardell for the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. The buildings are constructed of coursed stone rubble with ashlar dressings, and the former school has a slate roof.

The school is a two-storey building with gables to the west and east. The west side features two gables, with two arched first-floor casement windows and a cross-shaped ventilation slit. The ground floor has no windows and an angled corner, probably to avoid damage by traffic. The north side has four ogee-arched casements in rectangular moulded stone surrounds and a lean-to porch with an arched doorcase. The east side has one ogee-arched casement in a rectangular surround to the right of the first floor, a cambered-headed opening, and a narrow pointed arched doorcase below. The left side gable has a large two-light lancet in an ogee arch with pointed arched niches flanking and above it, and an ogee-arched window below.

The entrance gateway is attached to the former school at the north-western end. It comprises a central carriage arch flanked by two pedestrian arches. A central stepped parapet with a gabled stone roof surmounts the archways, with a coat of arms to the west and a blank niche to the east, topped by a cross-shaped saddlestone. Below is a tall arched central entrance with granite curbing stones and iron gates with elaborate ironmongery and additional wooden panels to the lower part. Buttresses flank either side of the central arch, with arched side pedestrian entrances fitted with iron gates and wooden panels.

The gateway and gatehouse are situated on the western boundary of a large convent site originally purchased in 1834 by Reverend Jones with a bequest of £10,000 from Lady Stanley of Puddington. In 1848, nuns of the newly formed teaching order, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, moved into the convent. William Wilkinson Wardell was employed to complete the convent building and design a Girls Poor School and entrance within the boundary walls, which had been erected in the middle of the 1830s. Wardell also built a presbytery on the site in 1856 and at about the same time a Training College to the south of the Girls Poor School. In 1874, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus moved to Mayfield, and in 1976 the site was bought for use as a summer language school, a use it has retained since then.

The school has been very little altered externally. The teaching order was founded in 1846 and was the first new native congregation of women founded in England since the Reformation. The buildings are of special architectural interest and have historic significance in relation to post-Reformation Catholic education in England and as an very early school established by this order.