Training College, Former Convent Of The Holy Child Jesus

This is a former school and training college on Magdalen Road in St Leonards-on-Sea. The northern section was built around 1849 as part of a Girls Poor School, and the southern section was added in 1856 as a purpose-built training college. Both parts were designed by William Wilkinson Wardell in Gothic style and built of coursed stone rubble with ashlar dressings and a slate roof. The building is mainly two storeys with attics, in places rising to three storeys with attics, and comprises 14 windows in total.

The west front of the northern section features a northernmost bay with two-light mullioned windows, followed by three bays with ogee-arched windows containing double lancets and three gables with mullioned windows. To the south is a wide gable of three storeys and attic with a central ogee-arched double lancet flanked by single lancet windows. A narrow two-storey staircase tower stands to the north of this gable, fitted with lancet windows, battlements decorated with cross-shaped motifs, and a triangular spire topped with a ball finial. The east elevation mirrors this arrangement but lacks the staircase window. Later ground-floor additions are not of special architectural interest.

The western side of the southern part displays five gabled dormers with mullioned windows. The lower floors have mullioned and transomed casements of two or three lights with trefoil heads. One buttress and an external stone chimneystack stand towards the northern end. The eastern side is similar, featuring three buttresses and a central three-storey square tower beneath a squat broached spire. The tower has two lancet windows and a statue beneath a canopy over a cambered arched doorcase. The south end is gabled with an arched tripartite gabled window with trefoil heads and a canted bay of two storeys with basement, the latter featuring mullioned and transomed windows with arched heads on the first floor and flat-arched windows on the ground floor.

The interior of the northern part contains a wooden winder staircase. The southern part has a dogleg staircase with two stick balusters to each tread and newel posts with moulded finials and pendants. Some attic rooms feature simple arched braced roofs. Four-panelled doors and simple wooden fireplaces with pilasters are found throughout.

Stylistically, the two sections show distinct characteristics that support the different construction dates. The northern part employs ogee-headed double lancet windows, while the southern part uses trefoil-headed windows, and there is a change in level at the junction between them.

The site was originally purchased in 1834 by Rev. Jones using a £10,000 bequest from Lady Stanley of Puddington. In 1848, nuns of the newly formed Catholic teaching order "The Society of the Holy Child Jesus" moved into the convent. Wardell was employed to complete the convent buildings and design a Girls Poor School with an entrance in the boundary walls, which had been erected in the mid-1830s. The foundation stone of the Girls Poor School was laid in 1849 and the entrance arch built in 1850. The Girls Poor School is now known as The Gatehouse. Wardell also built a presbytery on the site in 1856, and around the same time, Cornelia Connelly, founder of the order, obtained permission from the Catholic hierarchy to build a training college to the south of the Girls Poor School.

The Training College closed in 1862 and the building became the Middle School. In 1883, the Middle School relocated to Mayfield and the Junior School moved in. A tunnel connecting the building to the main convent was constructed at this time. Around 1914, the northern section was heightened by an additional storey. In 1974, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus moved the entire school to Mayfield. The site was purchased in 1976 and has been used as a summer language school since then.

This is a little-altered mid-19th-century Gothic educational building by the notable Catholic architect William Wilkinson Wardell. It holds historical significance as part of the story of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, the first new native congregation of women founded in England since the Reformation. It forms part of a group of listed buildings on the convent site, several of which were also designed by Wardell.