Victoria Hall

Victoria Hall, formerly known as St Mark's Sunday School, is a disused function hall and Sunday school located on Rawlinson Street in Barrow-in-Furness. It was built in 1888 by the architectural firm Paley and Austin from Lancaster. The building is constructed of red brick in English bond with some red sandstone dressings and features graduated slate roofs.

The hall has an irregular plan with a two-storey facade that consists of a 2:3:2:1 bay arrangement, including wings at the rear-centre and rear-right. The original windows are transomed casements with glazing bars throughout. The entrance is located in a single-bay projection on the far right, featuring recessed double doors and side windows under a lintel inscribed 'VICTORIA HALL'. Above the entrance, there is a moulded brick cornice with a pediment, and a single window above has a projecting stone sill and a cambered arch.

The facade is symmetrical around a three-bay gable, with the ground floor set below pavement level in a light-well surrounded by railings. The segmentally-arched ground-floor windows have brick hoodmoulds, while the first-floor windows lack hoodmoulds and are taller, flanking the central bay. The central bay features a two-storey, curved projection with two square-headed ground-floor windows beneath a drip course. Below three first-floor windows, a shield plaque is inscribed 'ST MARKS SCHOOLS 1888', and the windows have curved sills and lintels, with three-light casements that include leaded and stained glass depicting biblical figures, along with radially-glazed transom lights.

The roof has a semi-conical shape on a cornice that extends to the kneelers of the coped gable. From this roof rise two pilasters that support a triangular pediment with an oculus in the tympanum and a ball finial. The right end of the main roof and the entrance projection are hipped and feature finials. At the rear, the gable of the central wing has attic windows on two levels and is flanked by two hipped-roof projections. Each side of the main roof has twin gabled dormers. The interior has not been inspected. Paley and Austin submitted plans for this building as early as 1875, with various enlargements approved for which they received payments in 1881 and 1889, as recorded in the Cumbria Archives in Barrow.