FREE tours of a historic school building near Rugby are on offer this weekend as part of the Heritage Open Days festival.
Princethorpe College will be open on Sunday (September 8), when the school’s archive team will be conducting free tours of the College, and sharing the history of the building and the people who made it the place it is today.
Dating from 1833, St Mary’s Priory was one of the first Catholic monastic houses constructed in England after the Reformation, and until 1965 it was home to a congregation of Benedictine nuns.
The neo-Gothic chapel was designed by Peter Paul Pugin and finally finished in 1901. It includes the iconic Princethorpe Tower, the school’s modern-day emblem which can be seen from miles around.
The Priory was purchased by The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart who established Princethorpe College in 1966. The College has since grown into a fully co-educational Catholic independent day school.
This summer, renovation work has been completed on the final Station of the Cross and a decorated Altar Alcove in the former Nuns’ Library.
Both artworks had been hidden for around 40 years until last year, when refurbishment work began on the old Physics Labs.
Preserved behind classroom boards, the artworks were suffering from damage and the build-up of decades of dust and grime.
Specialist conservators used a range of cleaning, consolidating and retouching techniques to reveal and restore the nature-based design and stencilling on the painted wall above the alcove – which would have been specially commissioned by the nuns who founded the Priory – and to repair damage and restore the colours of the last station, which depicts Jesus being laid in the tomb.
The restored pieces will both be available for visitors to see on Heritage Open Day.
Guided tours of the site start at 2pm, 2.30pm and 3pm on Sunday (September 8). Visit https://tinyurl.com/zjx876zx for more information on the tours and the wider Heritage Open Days festival.
