Victoria House

Cadw's description

Location

Set back from the street behind a low walled forecourt.

History

11-15 Church Street was built in the early C20 on the site of the former North Wales Training College, and incorporated some of the earlier fabric and its overall plan. The college was built in the third quarter of the C19 and is shown on the 1890 Ordnance Survey. It was subsequently an Intermediate school. The houses are first shown on the 1918 Ordnance Survey.

Exterior

Belongs to a group of 11-13 Church Street.

A near symmetrical pair of 3-storey terraced houses of scribed and painted roughcast walls, and slate roof on deeply moulded and corbelled eaves, with roughcast end stacks. The houses are of 2 main bays, but asymmetry is provided by an additional bay on the L side of No 11 incorporating a passage to the rear of the houses that was retained from the earlier school. In the middle storey the windows are framed by pilasters with fluted capitals, sill band below and string course above. The doorways to the inner sides have hipped canopies on deep moulded cornices and openwork iron brackets, with iron cresting and panelled soffits. Both have half-lit fielded-panel doors with replaced overlights. The flanking bays have 2-storey canted bay windows articulated by thin colonnettes. In the lower storey they have hipped roofs to the smaller middle-storey windows, which have hipped roofs forming aprons (missing in no.13) with iron cresting. The lower-storey windows have transoms with leaded lights above them, and the middle storey has wood-framed cross windows with casements. Other windows are 4-pane sashes. In the upper storey are windows placed outside the line of the bay windows below. The L-hand bay of No 11 has a chamfered doorway to a boarded door with iron studs and inserted glazed panel, under a moulded cornice on corbels. Above the doorway is a blank panel, with sash windows to the middle and upper storeys.

The rear has a lower 2-storey gabled wing with 4-pane sash windows.

Reason for designation

Listed as part of a high-quality early C20 terrace retaining fine original detail, which completes a good C19 domestic group in Church Street.