Prior's Garth, Puttenham, Godalming, Surrey

Now known as Prior's Field.

The entry in Pevsner's Surrey (with Charles O'Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry, 2022) reads:

PRIOR’S FIELD SCHOOL. Originally Prior’s Garth, a simple rectangular block with roughcast walls, sloping buttresses at the corners, plain hipped roof, and two-storey canted bays on the garden front flanking a seat under the cover of an extension of the roof. Short square tower at the rear corner. By Voysey, 1900, repeating an unused design of 1898 for a house in Bexhill-on-Sea (East Sussex). Commissioned by Frank Harding Chambers, Assistant Master at Charterhouse, but never occupied by him. Inside, mostly preserved details, especially the oak-panelled hall (former dining room) with Wrecclesham green tiles round a concave fireplace in a pillared surround, and stair within a cage and screen of thin uprights. From 1901 Julia Huxley took it over as a progressive girls’ school. Tom Muntzer, Voysey’s assistant and son of his builder, designed the big extension of four ranges round an inner courtyard, completed after his death 1904-6. This presents a three-and-a-half storey central gable and nearly symmetrical side gables to the playing fields and steep roofs broken by large windows on the entrance side. Library on the first floor refitted in 1928 with furnishings by Russells of Broadway. Additional, very harmonious, classrooms (Field Wing) to the N by Brandon-Jones & Ashton in 1964 (extended 1988) and similarly treated Sports Hall of 2001 by Modern Design Group, Godalming.

Photograph by John Trotter.