Blocks 1 and 2 and linking arcade to Hanham Hall Hospital

Blocks 1 and 2 and linking arcade to Hanham Hall Hospital

This is a large rambling house built in 1655 for Richard Jones, now a former NHS psychiatric hospital, with an "A" plan and a long wing extending to the north. It has undergone significant alterations over the centuries.

The principal elevation faces south and features a recessed centre with a moulded stone parapet cornice and projecting gabled end units with moulded copings. The fenestration is arranged as 2+5+2 windows with sashes and exposed frames in shallow reveals. The building rises to two storeys with six gabled casement dormers to the centre and one three-light lunette in each gable face. The walling is rendered with slate roofs. The chimneys have been reduced; one has a stepped base to the right of the right-hand gable with two diagonal brick shafts. A small central clock turret with a wooden arcaded lantern and cupola crowns the roof. The central entrance is a solid stone porch with a semi-circular stone shell hood, and coved niches with shell heads in each inside wall. The doors are later 19th-century double glazed doors with a horse-shoe-shaped threshold. A two-bay extension to the right features three-light stepped windows with dripmould and transom; the centre light is round-headed, suggestive of a Venetian window, with a gable over the right-hand window. The gabled projections have square-section lead rainwater pipes with relief heads on clamps and on hoppers.

The rear elevation has three small gables to each end unit, with the right-hand end gable hipped. A parapet cornice runs across the centre, which represents an early 18th-century blocking of a former recessed centre with three irregular set-back gables. The window arrangement is 3+5+3, now with later wooden casements. The three left-hand attic gables retain moulded single-light windows of the original period. A central bolection architrave door opening contains a panelled door with an arched hollow stone hood on folded scroll-brackets. Modern single-storey extensions project to the left and right of the doorway. A central lead rainwater head features relief scroll-work.

A late 17th-century attached two-storey wing is set at an angle to the rear, with a slate roof. It contains three windows with three- and four-light casements with moulded stone mullions, and later lunette lights have been added over the ground-floor windows, filling the spaces below relieving arches. A Tudor-arch doorway has double studded doors and an arched hollow stone hood on folded scroll-brackets. A taller late Victorian two-and-a-half-storey extension to the right forms a link to the apex of the plan, with four windows and three tall gabled half-dormers. The cross-stroke of the plan comprises a covered corridor with a four-bay Tudor-arched arcade with parapet and central urn.

An "L"-plan extension to the north is much altered, but the staircase at the north end retains a barrel-stop moulded beam and carved string. One gable to the north-east has a coped verge.

The interior contains a circa 1710–1720s staircase entered from the north of the hall, which divides at a landing with a heavy moulded hand-rail and three twisted balusters per tread with a splayed bottom. The panelled dado has a ramped rail. A ground-floor room to the west of the hall is panelled with a carved scroll cornice dated "R 1A over 1655", referring to Richard Jones or Johnson. The hall and rooms above retain a large amount of early 18th-century panelling. The Dining Hall to the right is not of special interest.