The Gazebo at Rossall School

On the Fylde coast, in the grounds of Rossall School in Fleetwood, stands a survivor of an earlier age: the Gazebo. To stand before this small red-brick building, with its stone dressings and crenellated parapet, is to step out of the modern rhythm of school life and back into the eighteenth century, when it stood in the garden of Rossall Hall, the home of the Fleetwood family.

The Founding Story

The story of the Gazebo begins long before the first schoolbooks were opened on these grounds. It was built in the early eighteenth century in the grounds of Rossall Hall, the seat of the Fleetwood family, who had held the Rossall estate since 1583. According to its official listing, it was probably built either by Richard Fleetwood, who died in 1709, or by his son Edward, the last Fleetwood in the direct line, who died in 1757.

The Gazebo was placed directly opposite the front door of Rossall Hall. It is built of red brick with stone dressings; its west side is of channelled ashlar, which the listing describes as "of Moresby Hall, Cumberland". On the east side, two flights of seven stone steps meet at a door with the Fleetwood arms above it, and inside a stone staircase leads up to the roof. The flat stone-paved roof rests on brick tunnel vaults and is ringed by a crenellated parapet with three round openings on each side, which gives the garden building the look of a miniature fortress.

The Rise and Fall of Rossall Hall

The story of the Gazebo is bound up with the Fleetwood family and the coastal town that bears their name. Before the Reformation, the Rossall estate was a grange of Dieulacres Abbey in Staffordshire, let to the Allen family; Cardinal William Allen was born there in 1532. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Edmund Fleetwood's father bought the reversion of the lease, and when the last male heir of the Allens died in 1583, Rossall passed to Edmund Fleetwood. It then descended through the Fleetwoods and the Hesketh-Fleetwoods.

By the 1830s the family’s fortunes were changing. Sir Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood (1801–1866) poured his money into building a new town, Fleetwood, as a resort and port, and into the Preston and Wyre Railway, which opened in 1840 to connect it with the wider world. His town flourished, but the cost left him close to bankruptcy and forced him to sell most of his estates, including Rossall Hall.

In 1844 Sir Peter leased Rossall Hall for 21 years, with an option to buy it for £7,000, to a new school founded by the Reverend St Vincent Beechey, whom he had appointed vicar of Fleetwood. The Northern Church of England Boarding School, soon renamed Rossall College, opened on 22 August 1844 with 70 boys, and the rooms of the old hall filled with the chatter of Victorian schoolboys.

As the school grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new buildings rose around the old hall. Rossall Hall itself stood until 1931; its site is now taken by the school's Dining Hall, designed by Sir Hubert Worthington. The Gazebo survived, a reminder of the old hall in the middle of a school.

What the Walls Preserve

Today the Gazebo still shows the work of its eighteenth-century builders: the channelled ashlar of the west side, the Fleetwood arms over the door and the stone staircase that leads up to the paved roof. The wall that runs south from it is also listed at Grade II, and together they survive from the grounds of Rossall Hall.

An Enduring Legacy

The Gazebo was listed at Grade II on 31 March 1978 for its special architectural and historic interest. It links today's school with the Fleetwood family and with Sir Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood, who founded the town of Fleetwood.

The Gazebo stands within the grounds of a working school, so anyone hoping to see it should contact Rossall School first.

This article was written by EachMoment, which digitises old photographs, films and tapes, as part of a series on local heritage.