Morton Community Centre

The Morton Community Centre, also known as The Manor, is an early 19th-century house situated on the site of an earlier farmhouse. It is located on Wigton Road, Morton, Carlisle, and stands within its own grounds, Morton Park, reputedly landscaped by Gilpin. The building has cement-rendered walls built on a chamfered plinth, featuring V-jointed quoins and a dentilled eaves cornice. The roof is of graduated greenslate with rendered ridge chimney stacks. The building is two storeys with five bays on the front and a six-bay return (garden facade) forming an L-shape.

The projecting central porch is constructed of ashlar and features engaged Ionic columns, double panelled doors set within a stone architrave, a Chance family motto (DEO NON FORTUNA) incorporated into a dentilled broken segmental pediment. Sash windows with glazing bars are set within stone architraves; the upper-floor windows are smaller. The garden facade is composed of three distinct sections: a single-bay section on the left, a central two-bay section, and a right three-bay section. The central two-bay section has a panelled door and radial fanlight within an in-antis Ionic surround. Flanking this are squared bay windows; the left one has been converted to a French window. The left single bay has ground-floor C20 casement windows in stone architraves.

The interior retains original features, including marble fireplaces in the principal rooms, panelled shutters and doors within panelled reveals, and a 19th-century cantilever staircase with patterned cast-iron balusters and a moulded wooden handrail. There are also moulded plaster ceilings. A late 19th-century addition is a panelled wooden billiard room with heraldic shields. An internal inscription indicates that Sir Robert Chance gifted the house to the citizens of Carlisle as a community centre in 1944; he died in December 1960, and the centre officially opened on April 29, 1967.