Former Worthing Library, Museum and Art Gallery

Former Worthing Library, Museum and Art Gallery

This purpose-built library, museum and art gallery was completed in 1908, designed by the architects Crouch, Butler and Savage. The library was in part funded by Andrew Carnegie.

The building is constructed with red brick in English bond and ashlar to the main elevations, with Portland stone and rubbed brick dressings, slate roofs and oak joinery, fixtures and fittings.

The plan was originally U-shaped with the principal elevation facing east, but is now rectangular following a later twentieth-century northern extension. The building is laid out with the former library to the south and the museum and art gallery to the north, each with separate entrances and internal planning. The simpler decoration and smaller scale of the library suggest that the museum was the primary focus of the building, being intended as the main display space.

The library originally had an open ground floor space divided by open arcaded bays and two principal first floor library rooms, the larger being top-lit. The museum and art gallery contained an entrance hall and a separate room in the space now occupied by the foyer, with the principal museum room and top-lit gallery on the first floor. A third gallery was added to the north-east around 1960.

The main exterior range is two storeys and symmetrical in five principal bays arranged as 3:1:4:1:3, with three bay returns, executed in Edwardian Baroque manner. The front range is executed in high quality red brick with window surrounds in flush rubbed brick and with ashlar quoins, cill band and a deep modillion cornice. The entrance bays, in ashlar, break forward slightly and have giant order rusticated pilasters each supporting an open pediment with a modillion cornice. Originally identical, the museum entrance now has a semicircular Ionic portico; around 1960 the portico was removed from the library entrance, where only the pilasters remain, supporting a shallow cornice. Each entrance has a segmental arched doorcase within an eared architrave and a pair of oak doors, panelled below and glazed above, beneath a segmental fanlight. The first floor has a six-over-six pane sash within an eared architrave, and within the pediment is an oculus beneath a swagged garland. Sash windows are slightly recessed with heavy moulded glazing bars in early eighteenth-century manner, in six-over-nine panes on the ground floor where they have shallow stone aprons and pronounced keystones, and predominantly six-over-six on the first floor. Oculi flanking the entrance bays have moulded stone architraves beneath richly carved foliate swags. Centrally placed on the roof is an open-sided Tuscan lantern with a domed roof surmounted by an ornate weather vane.

The south return is in three symmetrical bays with narrower outer sashes. The reference library is set back slightly. The outer bays have narrow first floor sash windows, and an entrance in the western bay has a part-glazed door of three-over-two panes over two moulded panels, beneath a swept canopy. The ground floor has tripartite sash windows, whilst on the blank upper floor the bays are indicated by stone swags.

The north return is in three sections. The main range is in three equal bays; the main gallery is slightly set back and in more utilitarian red brick. In four bays, with full height buttress pilasters, it has tall ground floor blind arcades with tripartite windows and a blind upper floor. Beyond it is a later twentieth-century wing in buff and red brick with flush red brick round-arched blind arcades. It has two tripartite windows and a stone doorcase beneath an overlight and shallow canopy in the left hand bay. The rear elevation, extended to infill the void, has an entrance beneath a splayed canopy leading to a small garden.

The entrance lobby to the former library has a moulded ceiling with a pulvinated oak leaf frieze and a terrazzo floor. Mounted on the wall is a bronze commemorative panel with a richly moulded cartouche. The inner hall is defined by wide segmental-arched openings with eared architraves, moulded pilasters and cornices; a similar regime articulates the ground floor space to the rear, which is subdivided by later or temporary partitions to create the current education room and stores. Later interventions, when the library was enlarged and the space between the wings enclosed, have shallower mouldings.

Stone stairs with a slender steel balustrade of alternating balusters and open panels with scissor bracing and a central rosette, and ramped moulded timber rails lead to the former Reference Library and Reading Room (Sussex Room) on the first floor. The names of the rooms are just legible above the doorways. The Reference Library to the rear is a top-lit space in five bays, divided by a Tuscan screen at each end. Blind walls suggest that it was originally lined with bookcases. It has a glazed segmental roof of robust moulded ribs and glazing bars supported on moulded pilasters. The doorcase has a tall entablature, on which the name of the room is inscribed. The former Sussex Room, in the front range of the building, has a coved ceiling and moulded cornice, an oak segmental arched doorcase with an eared architrave and oak part-glazed doors. Walls are lined in glass-fronted oak bookcases and cupboards.

The museum and art gallery, which was designed for display, was more lavishly fitted out, in the Tuscan order on the ground floor and Ionic order on the first floor. The entrance and stair hall and former ground floor room, now one space, is lined with Tuscan pilasters and has deep moulded cornices. Stairs similar to those in the library rise to a gallery occupying the front range, articulated by Ionic screens. A moulded oak doorcase with an eared architrave and a pair of panelled doors leads to the main gallery space to the rear. It is top-lit, with a coved ceiling and flat glazed section, with moulded ribs supported on shallow pilasters which are partly concealed by museum fittings. Beyond it the museum has been extended.

Throughout the building oak doors have bronze and brass door furniture including brass plates bearing the Borough crest depicting three silver mackerel and a horn of plenty.