Euclid Street School Including Area Railings And Former Training Workshops And Principals House To The Rear

Euclid Street School is a pupil teacher training centre built in 1897 for the Swindon School Board. It is constructed of red brick with yellow terracotta dressings and has slate hipped roofs with finials and gables at the front. A tall brick stack is located on the southwest corner.

The building’s plan consists of a central single-storey hall, with a two-storey range of classrooms at the rear and in flanking wings. These wings include stairs and integral porches at the front corners. To the rear (south), there is a detached double-pile range of training workshops, and in the southeast corner of the site sits the principal’s house. The entire site is enclosed by area railings.

The architecture is in a Free Dutch style with some Gothic details. The north front features a projecting central single-storey hall with a hipped roof behind a pierced parapet and large, moulded elliptical arch windows with keystones between buttresses. Flanking gables have moulded terracotta strings and window lintels. A large pointed arch terracotta arch sits above two first-floor windows, featuring an oculus in the tympanum. The gables are panelled and have terracotta scrolled kneelers and finials. Integral porches on the left and right have round arches with keyblocks and stepped stair windows above. The side and rear (south) elevations are six- and fifteen-bayed, respectively, and have moulded terracotta window lintels and a string course at first floor. Sash windows incorporate over-lights. Two louvered ventilators with lead-clad pyramidal roofs are on the roof ridges.

The hall has steel arched trusses, and much of the original interior joinery remains. The detached training workshops are a plain red brick, single-storey, double-pile building with cambered arches to narrow sash windows and corbelled brick eaves to a twin-span hipped roof with ridge-lights. The roof was later re-clad in concrete tiles. The detached principal’s house is a plain, two-storey red brick building with a slate gable-ended roof, small gables over the first-floor windows, a canopy on brackets extending over a canted bay and panelled door, and sash windows with cambered arches.

Area railings surround the site, with brick dwarf walls and brick piers with terracotta caps along the north front and on the east and west sides. Euclid Street School is an unusually complete example of a Board school day training centre for pupil teachers.