I was intrigued when I passed this building so I took these photographs hoping that I would be able to uncover its history.  I put up the page with cursory comments because I wasn't able to find any references to it.  The best I could do was to say, "Whilst the building has obviously been used for commercial ventures and has been advertised for lease as a "warehouse",  it has the look of a public building."

However, I now think that I have discovered its story.  The 1845 map of the area shows that the Royal Lancastrian School occupied the site, as you can see below. 

The term Lancastrian doesn't refer to the county but to Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker and educator who devised a system of instruction called the Monitorial System.  This involved older, more advanced pupils teaching younger children so that a small number of adult masters could administer a large number of pupils.  If the internal plan of the school on the map indicates the seating arrangement, then it was a school that educated a large number of pupils.  In England the Lancastrian method was popular in the early decades of the 19th Centrury and a number of schools were opened between 1813 and 1830, which must be roughly when this one in New Cross was built.

However, is this building on Chadderton Street the original Royal Lancastrian School building or one that replaced it on the site?  Since I have found no references to verify or dismiss this fact, then all I can do, at this point, is draw my own conclusions and I am of the view that it is, for the following reasons.

First of all the configuration of the building with the school on the Marshall Street side of the block and a narrow yard behind a wall on the Goulden Street side is still the case.  There are problems though because, in 1845 the school extended all the way to New Cross Street, whereas today there is a small yard at the back of the building.  This may have happened in 1861 because records show that Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of the Town Hall, made alterations to the Lancastrian School in that year.  The aerial photograph below shows the building in 1953 and you can see the building that we see today.


So today's building is shorter than the original Lancastrian School and has a side annex that wasn't there in 1845, but on balance I'd say that the building, with its rather institutional looking front, is of the period and has the same basic layout.  The little cupola/ventilator in the middle of the roof is one often seen on older school buildings.  The school below is Plymouth Grove School which has a similar cupola.

Secondly, there is a school in Manchester operating in 2011 called The Lancastrian which specializes in the education of children with communication and interaction needs.  It was founded at the University of Manchester in 1906 and was known as the Santa Fina School.  The school's website says that later it moved, "to the Joseph Lancaster School in New Cross, Manchester."  It was because of  this that they changed their name to the Lancastrian School.  They stayed there until after WWII when they relocated to West Didsbury.  So when they moved in, somewhere between 1906 and say 1930, the building was the Lancastrian School.  They moved out in the 1940s and, as we can see from the aerial photograph, the building hasn't changed since then.  So I think it likely that they moved into the original, if modified, building and it hasn't changed since they left.

If Manchester Corporation's Listed Buildings online database is up to date, the building is not listed and in recent years it has obviously been modified to accommodate commercial tenants.  Most of the windows have been bricked up and there was evidence in 2010, when I took these pictures, of a fire around one of the existing windows on Marshall Street.