2 Boarding Houses On East Side With Cloisters Attached To These Dining Hall On North Side Of Courtyard At St Johns School Main Building On South Side

School founded in 1851 at St John's Wood, London, and transferred to Leatherhead in 1872. The complex comprises a dining hall on the north side of a courtyard, two matching boarding houses on the east side with attached cloisters, and the main school building on the south side. All buildings are constructed in red brick with limestone dressings and slate roofs with copper fleches, executed mostly in Flemish Gothic style.

The dining hall is rectangular with an apsidal west end. Although a single storey in actual height, it presents the appearance of 2½ storeys. The design is symmetrical, featuring buttresses, a parapet, and small octagonal embattled corner turrets. The central entrance is formed by a porch of three bays projected from the cloister, with gablets above the arches and an arched inner doorway. Above the cloister, each bay contains a 3-stage transomed 15-light window with arched top lights and a small upstand in the parapet, except for the centre bay which has a kneelered gablet containing a clockface. The roof features small triangular dormers in the 2nd and 6th bays, a tall decorated copper-clad fleche at the centre of the ridge, and coped gables. The five-sided west apse is fitted with matching windows, while the east end contains a large Perpendicular window. The interior has panelled walls and a roof of arch-braced collar trusses carrying radiating struts in semicircular arches.

The cloisters enclose the whole of the north and east sides of the courtyard, forming a visual bond between the dining hall and the two boarding houses. They comprise arcades of 2-centred arches arranged in pairs between buttressed piers. The arches are of brick with central columns of stone topped with annular caps, linked by stone hoodmoulds. A continuous stone-coped parapet runs around the entire cloister. The cloister level rises a step at the north-east corner and again between the two houses, running into the porches of the houses on the north and east sides.

The two boarding houses are of matching design, cruciform in plan with lateral entrance halls in the centre. Each is 2½ and 3½ storeys high, arranged in 2:3:2 bays in a symmetrical composition. The 3½-storey centre section features buttresses rising to the 2nd floor, an open arcade of flattened arches at ground floor, a very narrow 2-storey oriel in the centre with curved glazing and a semi-conical stone cap, cross windows in the flanking bays, and an attic window of 5 arched lights beneath a wide 2-centred arch. Side-wall chimneys and steeply pitched roofs with decorated copper niches in the centre complete each house. The side ranges contain similar cross-windows at 1st floor level and attic windows of 2 arched lights rising into gabled dormers.

The main school building, linked to the boarding houses by the cloister and forming the south side of the courtyard, presents a U-shaped plan with its principal facade facing south. It is 2½ storeys high with 5 bays and projecting 5-bay wings, arranged symmetrically. The centre takes the form of a 3-stage gate-tower with a wide 2-centred arched moulded doorway at ground level, a stone oriel at 1st floor featuring curved transomed windows and a semi-conical cap, and at 2nd floor two square-headed lancets flanking a central oculus. A stone band with corner gargoyles supports a flat parapet. The main range and wings are furnished with transomed windows at ground and 1st floors, gabled half-dormers with arched plate-traceried 2-light windows, and various tall chimneys. The sides and rear are executed in similar style.

The main building was gutted by fire in 1913 and rebuilt in 1914.