Air Balloon Hill Council Schools, Infant School

Air Balloon Hill Council Schools, Infant School is an infant school built in 1905 by architects Latrobe and Weston. The building features pennant rubble with limestone ashlar dressings and has double Roman tile hipped, gabled roofs. It consists of a central hall with classrooms to the right and hall and service blocks to the left, designed in an Art Nouveau style. The structure is asymmetrical, with ashlar bands at the cills, lintels, and in between, as well as coped gables.

The hall has gabled ends and includes a large Venetian window with a two-centred arched middle window, side dormers, and a square ridge cupola with angle buttresses topped by a copper dome. In front of the hall is a single-storey block featuring a right-hand doorway with a heavy, weathered lintel and a left-hand porch with a segmental-arched doorway flanked by round piers with domed tops.

To the right, there is a projecting gable with a tall central segmental-arched window and lower flanking flat-headed windows, separated by shallow buttresses, with blind oculi above. The right return has a range of three similar gables. To the left of the hall is a three-storey service block with a hipped roof, a corbel table, a pair of semicircular first-floor windows, and narrow rising stair lights to the left. The left return features a 15-window range, with a gable opposite the rear, two groups of four windows leading to a tall central hall with high paired half dormers and a half-hipped roof, along with four ground-floor windows at the front. The windows are 4/4-pane sashes.

Inside, the central hall boasts an Art Nouveau-styled hammer beam roof. This school is part of a group with the Junior School and Instruction Centre, sharing many architectural details with them. It is a notable example of the work of one of the few Bristol architects who experimented with Art Nouveau.