342-347 St Anne's Hill and St Ann's Hall, including archway to Edinburgh Square

342-347 St Anne's Hill and St Ann's Hall, including archway to Edinburgh Square

A distinctive group of six two-and-a-half-storey cottages, with an adjoining former Sunday school hall, built in red Sussex brick with rubble stone plinth and ashlar dressings. The first floor is hung with hand-made clay tiles, and the roofs are covered in clay tiles throughout.

The cottages form an L-shaped arrangement at the corner of St Anne's Hill and Edinburgh Square. Each cottage follows a simple plan with kitchen and living room on the ground floor and two bedrooms above. Behind each is a single-storey service range originally containing scullery, coal store and WC, which projects into a small private yard. These yards connect via an alleyway that opens onto Edinburgh Square through an archway. The former Sunday school, a single-storey hall, stands at a slight angle at the eastern end of the row.

The architecture draws on a free Arts and Crafts interpretation of local vernacular combined with Gothic detail. The composition is deliberately loose and picturesque, with an irregular street line, much projection and recession, and strong contrasts in height and scale. The upper floor throughout is tile-hung with alternating bands of plain and scalloped tiles. The steep tiled roofs feature scalloped barge-boards and tall ridged and corbelled stacks. Windows are small-paned timber casements, and doors have similar glazing in their upper panels; all doors except those on the hall are now painted in the estate's distinctive 'Cowdray Yellow'.

The cottages divide into two main blocks. Numbers 342–345, to the east on St Anne's Hill, form a long, roughly symmetrical rectangular block beneath a single pitched roof. Numbers 343 and 344 project slightly forward in the centre, with front doors set within a Gothic-arched recess flanked by two narrow slit windows. At the rear, tall gabled dormers light the attic space. Numbers 346 and 347 face Edinburgh Square, with twin gables projecting from a higher gablet roof and a large central stack. The street corner is canted at ground level with a stylised nodding-ogee canopy supporting the upper floor; a perspective published in the Building News shows this enclosing a carved heraldic crest and drinking fountain, though there is no evidence this was ever executed. The doorway to No. 346 facing St Anne's Hill has a shouldered surround with a small blind Gothic-arched 'window' to the left. The rear outshut to this house connects it to the other main block and is emphasised by a central cross-gable with a circular window and decorative timberwork in the apex. No. 346's doorway facing the square sits within a Gothic-arched recess; a larger freestanding Gothic archway to the right leads through to the alley.

St Ann's Hall stands alongside No. 342 at the rear of the group. Its gable-end faces the street and is tile-hung at the apex with a large mullion-and-transom window below, with the entrance doorway to the right and a Gothic-arched gateway to the left leading to the side passage.

The cottage interiors are very simple, with four-panel doors, plain timber skirtings, and stairs featuring square newels and stick balusters. The former school has an arch-braced roof, now concealed by a modern suspended ceiling.