Lodge House, Lord Wandsworth College

Lodge House at Lord Wandsworth College

This lodge house was built in 1914-1915 to a design by Reginald Blomfield. It comprises the original main building with an inter-war range and connecting block added subsequently to the west.

The building is constructed of red brick with rough-cast rendered sections, stone dressings, and clay tile roofs and wall sections.

The lodge is a two-storey structure with the upper storey set into the roof pitch, planned on a square footprint. The main entrance projects from the east elevation and opens into a hallway. At the west end of the hallway stands a newel stair, with communal rooms accessed on either side, along with a bathroom and separate WC. The stairs lead up to bedroom dormitories on the first floor, accessed from a central landing. A connecting block and rear entrance to the west provide access through to a single-storey range of flats (not inspected internally).

Architecturally, the lodge is designed in a restrained Queen Anne style and was conceived as a unified composition with the main college gates, behind which the building is set back to the south-west. The north elevation, facing White Hill Road, features a broad gable-end bay with rough-cast rendered upper floor and brick ground floor. A central window sits under a stepped, gauged brick arch with brick quoins to the corners. The gable displays a large Venetian window set within a moulded timber surround beneath a date panel inscribed '1915'. This arrangement is repeated on the south elevation. The principal entrance to the east elevation faces the main college approach road and projects slightly from the rest of the elevation. It has a red brick ground floor with an offset window to the south and a cut-away section supported by a single stone Doric column to the east, forming a covered entrance area with a herringbone-pattern brick floor and an original part-glazed door beneath a segmental brick header. Above, the gable end carries hung clay tiles and a narrower central Venetian window. The west elevation is entirely of brick with smaller windows flanking a projecting chimney stack, though this elevation is largely obscured by the connecting block to the later west range.

The inter-war range, dating to the late 1920s, has a shallow pitched roof with exposed rafter ends and regularly spaced multi-paned casement windows along the side elevations, with a plain gable end facing north. The main lodge roof has a north-south running ridge with a substantial paired brick chimney stack featuring a connecting arch at the centre. The gable above the entrance projects out from beneath the ridge line with a hipped join to the east pitch.

Most windows to the main lodge house are later replacement casements following the form of the originals shown in archive photographs, whereas the western late-1920s range retains principally original casements.

Internally, the original simple plan arrangement remains evident, with distinct communal rooms at ground-floor level and bedroom dormitories above. Most rooms have been modernised, chiefly through conversion and renewal works undertaken in 1988-1989 as part of the integration of the lodge within the new Gosden House complex. Fire doors have been inserted and fireplaces with their surrounds removed. Some original joinery survives, including the staircase with balusters and shaped newel, together with several door and window architraves, skirting boards, and picture rails.