Caretakers House, Elmgrove Primary School, Beersbridge Road, Belfast, County Antrim, BT5 4RS

Caretaker's House, Elmgrove Primary School, Beersbridge Road, Belfast

This two-storey red brick caretaker's house was built in 1936 to designs by Reginald Sharman Wilshere (1888–1961), a Belfast-based English architect, as a purposely designed companion to Elmgrove Primary School, which was completed three years earlier in 1933. The listing covers the house together with its boundary walling, gate, and railings. The house sits on the south side of Beersbridge Road, to the northwest of the main school buildings, and together with the school forms one of very few buildings of architectural and historic interest surviving in this part of the street. It is now in private residential use, having been converted from its original purpose around 1990 after a period of dereliction.

Wilshere was appointed architect to the Belfast Corporation Education Committee in 1926 and went on to design 26 new schools before the outbreak of the Second World War. Elmgrove Primary School, erected between 1930 and 1933, was one of his major works. In 1932 Wilshere stated that "every one of [my schools] has something distinctive about it architecturally, though all follow the same line in planning, and in that respect are in conformity with the best modern practice." The Irish Builder recorded that his guiding philosophy was that "if the children of a district have no beauty in their daily surroundings, they need beauty all the more in their schools," and his typical approach was to arrange large school buildings around quadrangles with corridors open to the air. Wilshere was also responsible for designing the associated outbuildings and caretakers' lodges at many of his schools; the architectural historian Paul Larmour described these ancillary buildings as "each one in itself a gem." As with the rest of Wilshere's lodges and outbuildings, the materials, architectural features, and layout of this house have been carefully chosen to complement the main school buildings whilst forming a considered composition in its own right.

The building is noted by architectural historian J. A. K. Dean as having been influenced by the work of Edwin Lutyens. Dean describes it as "proud and lofty on an elevated site, the two-storey gate house rises from a double plinth to a wide eaved pyramidal roof with red pantiled finish. Symmetrical front elevation dominated by a central projecting flat roofed hall with chamfered corners and semi-circular arched doorway. Flanking, two tiny slit windows and above a single wide casement light with squared panes. Tall chimney stack riding from a side elevation."

The house is of square plan with a small attached timber outbuilding, used as a boiler house, to the east. The roof is a pyramidal form clad in red clay tiles with overhanging eaves, half-round aluminium guttering, and circular aluminium downpipes. A tall red brick chimney stack with corbelled coping and clay chimney pots rises from the side elevation. The walls are finished in rustic red brick laid in stretcher bond with a double-chamfered plinth course. Windows throughout are original six-paned, square-headed timber casements with clear glazing unless otherwise noted, set on painted concrete cills. The heads have a brick stretcher course with a double row of clay tiles over, forming a hood.

The principal, north-facing elevation is symmetrical. At its centre is a single-storey flat-roofed projecting porch with chamfered corners and a recessed round-arched door opening, into which a replacement glazed timber door opens onto two nosed steps. Narrow three-pane windows with frosted glazing flank the porch at ground floor level, and above the entrance door at first floor level is a central window. The ground floor windows to this porch projection have clay tile cills and vertically laid tiles forming a flat-arched head.

The three-bay east elevation is dominated by the projecting chimney to its central bay. The north bay has a single six-pane casement window with frosted glazing at ground floor and a double casement window above at first floor, with the attached single-storey timber outbuilding adjacent to the projecting chimney at this bay. The south bay has a narrow three-pane window with a top opening light in frosted glazing, with a clay tile cill and head as described above. The south elevation has a four-part window at ground floor and a three-part window at first floor. The west elevation is arranged in two bays: the south bay has single windows at ground and first floor; the north bay has a square-headed door opening fitted with a modern sheeted timber door, and a double window above at first floor.

The house stands on a slightly elevated site, approached from Beersbridge Road by four steps to the front garden. The grounds include a grassed yard with a tarmacked pathway to the front on the north side, and a spacious garden to the rear on the south side. The rear garden is separated from the front yard by a brick wall to the west and a timber fence with a sheeted gate to the east of the house. The rear garden is modestly landscaped and includes a timber deck to the northwest leading to the rear door, and a wooden shed to the northeast. The site is enclosed by a low brick wall topped with simple wrought-iron railings with arrowhead railing tops, accessed from Beersbridge Road through a simple wrought-iron gate. Brick walling encloses the site to the west, with metal railings and hedges to the east and south.

Elmgrove Primary School was officially opened on 9th March 1933. The total rateable value of the new school was set at £800 under the First Revaluation in 1935. The combined rateable value of the school and caretaker's house was subsequently increased to £1,500 by the end of the Second Revaluation, which ran from 1956 to 1972. The school was listed in 1994 and continues in use as a primary school. In recent years the former caretaker's house has been renovated, with new aluminium rainwater goods installed and a new entrance door added.