St. James' Primary School, St. James Road, Kilwarlin, Hillsborough, County Down

St. James' Primary School

A single-storey four-bay symmetrical former Victorian school dated 1845, located at the junction of Moira Road and St James Road in Kilwarlin, adjacent to St James Church. The building has a rectangular plan form with rear returns.

The principal elevation faces east and is symmetrically arranged. The roof is pitched with natural slate and clay ridge tiles, featuring a pair of ventilation cowls on the ridge line. Cast-iron half-circle gutters with circular downpipes drain the roof. Red-brick walling in Flemish bond with a corbel course at eaves level forms the exterior. The windows have been replaced with uPVC units with flat arch lintels and painted sandstone cills. The centrally located gabled entrance porch is painted brick with a chamfered Tudor-arched opening and a plain projected string course incorporated into the copings. A timber plaque inscribed "St James Primary School" is surmounted by a "Downshire" plaque inscribed with the date "1845". The porch has lancet openings with glazed wrought-iron window frames on its north and south cheeks. The principal elevation is arranged with two windows either side of the porch. The left gable contains a pair of tall lancet-arched windows with a centrally located diminutive lancet-arched timber louvered vent above. The right gable is symmetrically arranged with a large square-headed opening centrally located with a concrete lintel and cill, and a diminutive lancet-arched timber louvered vent above.

The rear elevation has a single window on the far right, with the central and left bays abutted by rear returns. A central gabled return, two bays deep and added circa 1920, is built in distinctly newer brick but largely matching the earlier block in detail. This return has a central single window to its west-facing gable and a single window to the right on its south face, with a single timber casement window on its north face. An earlier gabled return to the left bay, single bay deep, has a timber-framed bi-partite fixed window left of centre on the gable and a timber-sheeted door left of centre on the north face. A red-brick chimney was installed as part of the later rear return.

Internally, original A-framed timber trusses with purlins and a diagonally sheeted timber ceiling survive. The front door is a timber-sheeted double-leaf Tudor-arched type with wrought-iron ironmongery.

The building is set adjacent to St James's Church. The front boundary is marked by a modern red-brick wall with modern gates to the vehicular entrance, though original wrought-iron pedestrian gates remain adjacent to the front entrance. To the rear of the site is a small car park with a single-storey red-bricked outbuilding with corrugated metal roof, boarded timber doors, timber bargeboards, and a modern flat-roofed toilet block extension. The north and west of the site have largely been developed with housing, with further housing opposite the front entrance.

The building replaced an earlier school shown to the north on the 1833 Ordnance Survey map. That earlier building served dual purposes, functioning as both a school and place of worship for the farming community around Hillsborough, but it was destroyed during the "Night of the Big Wind" in January 1839. The rector of Hillsborough, Archdeacon W. B. Mant, obtained a site from the Marquess of Downshire for a new church, for which Charles Lanyon provided his architectural services free of charge. The church opened as a chapel-of-ease to Hillsborough in 1841, and the school was completed in 1845. Both buildings were listed in Griffith's Valuation as "St James' Church, yard and parochial school house," valued at £14 10s with 10s for the yard. The school was run by the Church Education Society until it became a National School in 1878. A teacher's residence, now gone, was added to the site in 1896 and valued at £6. From 1878 until at least 1886, an evening school was held in the building, where 46 men, mostly weavers and farm labourers, enrolled to study reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic. In 1923 St James's became a Public Elementary School, at which time it appears to have been extended. The Marquess of Downshire handed over the lease of the school premises to the Down and Connor and Dromore Diocesan Board of Education in 1925. During the Second World War, the number of pupils more than doubled through evacuees from Belfast, with all ninety-five pupils taught in two classrooms. One evacuee in 1941/2 was Ivor Mills, a future ITN newsreader. The school won the National Curriculum Award in 1990 and 1997. It closed in 2003 with 127 pupils enrolled, and was noted as one of the oldest schools in the South Eastern Board's area. The building is currently in use as a hall and remains in Church of Ireland ownership.