Howells School, Original Building with Big Hall

Howells School, Original Building with Big Hall

This school is constructed in pale grey roughly coursed and squared lias limestone with Forest of Dean ashlar dressings, and Welsh slate gabled roofs featuring fishscale banding and tiled cresting. The architectural style is austere Continental Late Gothic, apparently drawing influence from medieval collegiate buildings, though with minimal decoration befitting a charitable foundation.

The original building comprises an entrance wing with a small quadrangle behind it and an eastward-projecting wing at the south end of the entrance wing.

The entrance wing contains windows to the Board Room on the ground floor at its north end. The Board Room features two transomed and mullioned windows flanking a centre 3-light window with a pointed head; above these are two end transomed and mullioned windows with a panel containing a coat-of-arms in the centre. South of the Board Room is an entrance accessed via steps through the base of a buttressed rectangular four-stage clock tower. The tower has a tall pyramidal slate roof with bell-cast eaves and a small louvred belfry opening on each face. The pointed doorway features carved spandrels and a headmould. An inscription above reads: "This School for the board, clothing and education of orphan girls was erected in the year 1859 by the Drapers Company of the City of London out of funds bequeathed to them by Thomas Howell one of their members who died at Seville in Spain in Anno Domini 1537." Above the inscription is a coat of arms and a canopied statue of Our Lady in a niche (the statue is by Frank Roper), flanked by small windows. A single window with a hoodmould sits above this, followed by a projecting clock beneath a machicolated parapet.

South of the entrance tower are four bays containing 2 and 3-light mullioned and transomed windows on the ground floor serving offices, and a canted bay window for the Headmistress's sitting room. Above this is a 3-light mullion-and-transom window topped by a gable. The roofs are very steeply pitched with a tall ridge stack on the right-hand gable.

The eastward-projecting wing at the south end of the entrance wing begins with a single-storey Day Room on its west end, featuring five windows of 3-trefoil-headed lights in a pointed head with a parapet above. To the rear of the Day Room is a two-storey wing where the second and fourth first-floor windows have pointed heads with gables above, while the windows between them have 3-light rectangular-headed lights. East of the Day Room is a 2-storey gabled bay with a 3-light pointed-head transomed window on the first floor, and below it a round-headed doorway with a gabled canopy flanked by three round-headed windows to the left. An octagonal belfry with a peaked roof stands at the east end of this gable, with louvred bell openings. Further east are two later two-storey wings projecting eastward with gable ends facing east.

The south-east elevation was originally symmetrical, with wider gables at the centre and at the ends, and intermediate wings between end and centre gables, each of five bays with small pointed gables over the second and fourth bays as on the upper floor to the rear of the Day Room. Ridge stacks punctuate the roofline. The centre gable is now obscured by the Big Hall addition of 1900, executed in Perpendicular style. The Hall's upper window on the south-east end is 5-lights in a curved head, flanked by buttresses, with transomed 3-light windows on the upper level in each return.

The quadrangle to the rear of the entrance wing has flagged stone paving and a modern metal fountain sculpture. The south-west and north-west sides comprise single-storey ranges. The south-west kitchen wing now has a gabled bay to the south and a two-storey section with a hipped slate roof to the north. The north-west side of the quadrangle features a single-storey wing in front with a later three-storey wing projecting south-west from the north gable end of the entrance wing to the rear.

The interior includes, at the south-east end of the entrance wing, the Stone Hall with a stone staircase in straight flights featuring a cast iron balustrade and a pyramidal lantern above. South of this is the Big Hall, a later insertion featuring stained wood panelling and a panelled ceiling, which likely conceals a hammer-beam roof. The walls above the panelling are decorated with contemporary murals depicting scenes from Shakespeare's plays, notably "The Merchant of Venice". The Board Room to the right of the main entrance remains unaltered. The interiors were otherwise not fully examined at the April 2002 resurvey.