School Adjacent To Number 1

This is a school built around 1860, situated on a corner plot between St Paul's Square and Brewing Road in Tiverton. It was commissioned by Caroline Brewin, daughter of John Heathcoat, as part of a coordinated group of buildings including St Paul's Street and centred around St Paul's Church. The buildings were constructed on land donated by Heathcoat and funded through rental income from surrounding houses.

The school is designed to resemble a terrace of middle-class houses, either in its initial design or through later expansion. It’s built with yellow Flemish bond brick facing the front, while the rear and end walls are of stone rubble with brick dressings. The south end wall is roughcast, and the building has slate roofs, brick chimney shafts topped with crowned chimney pots, and cast-iron rainwater goods and window sills, which resemble those on Heathcoat’s industrial housing.

The architectural style is Georgian. From the Brewing Road front, the school presents a two-story facade with five windows, the right-hand end gabled and featuring deep verges supported by brackets. The ground floor has three hornless 16-pane timber sash windows and two round-headed doorways designed to look like residential entrances, featuring rusticated quoins, Greek key mouldings on the reveals, and simple fanlights with spoke glazing bars. The lower panels of the four-panel front doors are flush. A triple first-floor window sits within the gable, consisting of a round-headed sash with margin panes flanked by two 4 over 4-pane sashes.

The elevation facing St Paul’s Square is ten bays wide, arranged to mimic the facades of four houses, with rainwater downpipes integrated into chases within the walls. It has ten first-floor hornless 16-pane timber sash windows and four doorways consistent with those on the Brewing Road frontage, all with disused panelled doors. The rear elevation retains sash windows. The interior retains some original joinery.