Denied promised land grants this group moved from York's Hollow, near Wickham Terrace, to what became known as Fortitude Valley.

The site in Brookes Street was selected, and the students took up residence in the 1867 two-storeyed building designed by Benjamin Backhouse.

As enrolments continued to grow the need to provide additional facilities saw a second building designed by Richard Suter constructed in 1874.

During his eight years in Brisbane he was to erect more than 100 buildings, drawing from a wide range of public, commercial and private clients.

Their decoration and construction details are reminiscent of the Gothic Revival style favoured for ecclesiastical and educational buildings of the time.

Within this idiom, these buildings give expression to a more restrained Gothic, displaying a sense of mass solidity and simplicity.

[1] This free-standing two-storey red face brick building sits on a rusticated Brisbane tuff base.

Though asymmetrical, the school is designed to a basilica-like plan with the narthex and nave expressed externally by steeply pitched intersecting gable roofs.

To the north, a timber single-storey room with gable roof and decorative paired brackets projects from the middle of the nave.

The words "primary school" are spelt out in projecting brick on the north side of the nave at the upper floor level.

Curved sunhoods with bold brackets and lattice spandrel screens shelter the windows of the ground floor to the west and southwest.

High set windows to the south and west of the small teaching rooms also accommodated galleried classes.

A light and airy room, with a mansard profile sheeted and battened ceiling, it is lit by a bank of south facing windows.

[1] This axially-planned, symmetrical one-storey brick building is east of the former Girls and Infants School and also conforms to a basilica-like plan.

Separate, steeply pitched gabled roofs express the narthex and nave and the main entrance is from a five-sided apse porch to the north.

The building sits on stone foundations and the verandahs to the east and west rest on low brick piers.

The large school room has been subdivided into two spaces by a vertical tongue and groove lined post and rail framed partition.

The two small teaching rooms are lit from the south by a bank of casement windows and each opens to its adjacent verandah.

[3] Fortitude Valley State School was listed on the Queensland Heritage Register on 26 March 1999 having satisfied the following criteria.

They are rare examples of the Gothic Revival style favoured for ecclesiastical and educational buildings in the nineteenth century.

The two buildings are important for their intact interiors including; roof trusses, timber lined ceilings, joinery, and apse stair.

The design allowed for large schoolrooms combined with small classrooms that accommodated galleried seating, features essential to the nineteenth century Lancastrian teaching system.