Teaching for a better society

We had an end-of-project conference the other day to report our findings to other researchers, people involved in training English teachers and a fair representation of former teachers from the period we've been studying, 1945-65. There were also a handful of young teachers from London schools.

The striking contrast with today is that there existed then a significant number of London teachers who were so concerned with how well they were able to do their job that they were willing to give up endless evenings and weekends to meet together in study groups, for discussion and to hear speakers. Teachers today work just as hard, I believe, but don't organise themselves to meet for self-driven professional purposes. As for how much professional discussion goes on in department meetings I don't know enough to say.

Why the difference? In 1949, 1956, 1965 there was little extrinsic motivation to do the job well: pay was poor and few teachers were on anything above the basic pay scale.

One thing the two groups, then and now, have in common is that both would probably agree that the society they live in leaves much to be desired. The difference is that in those post-war decades there was a belief that education could make a serious contribution to making it better; for the teachers at our meeting, teaching English was a social project. I doubt if anyone today believes that an important key to building a better society lies in what teachers do with kids in their classrooms. If teachers today are wanting to do good, and many are, it's by helping individuals to liberate themselves by education from whatever's holding them back from a full and flourishing life.

A second difference might be that in 1956 those teachers believed there was a social group in which hope could be placed, namely that huge number of working-class children -- i.e. the majority of children -- who the system had neglected, except by picking a minority out for sponsorship in the grammar schools. I never hear it said these days that the hope for the future lies in the working class.

Is there a group in which hope might be placed? One that immediately suggests itself is the immigrant population that quite clearly contains large numbers of intelligent and admirable young people. But I don't hear it said that they're the hope either, even though many teachers appreciate their contribution to the schools.

The reason surely is that what's wrong with society today won't be solved by education; the problems are structural, to do with globalisation, corporations and finance. Of course, the problems were structural then, too, in the sense of social class, though people perhaps didn't see that so clearly; they thought education could make a difference, both through new structures (comprehensive schools) and through teaching that induced habits of mutual respect and cooperation, as well as assertiveness and criticality; if the citizenry were imbued with democratic values, things would clearly be better.

A dramatic rail journey

One of the most dramatic railway routes in England must be that from Waterloo East to London Bridge. It takes five minutes at most but goes through the most exhilarating cityscape, from iconic buildings of Southwark and the City to offices you can practically read the papers in to Dickensian rooftops and garrets close enough shake hands through the bedroom windows. For a slideshow on Picasa click here.

Swallows in Surbiton

Never seen so many from my back window as this year. Usually it’s the odd one or two at very infrequent intervals, but now I see them often and 6-10 at a time. Is this because it’s been such a warm spring and summer, or have new nesting sites become available or been chosen by them? I’d love to know where they are nesting.

Swallows are for me the most magical bird, for the gusto of their flying and their migratory lifestyle. One of things I envy my sister for, living in rural Pembrokeshire, is that every year she sees them return to nest in the eaves and barns and can watch them wheeling and swooping all summer long, and finally watch them lining up on the telegraph wires read to ‘go back where they came from’ -- to everyone’s regret.

It’s one of the things I’d most like to live in the country for (impracticable idea -- where would I see my Miro exhibitions, browse in big bookshops, hear 20 different languages a day, see big orchestras, consult an Apple Genius bar and attend talks on Adam Smith, new archaeological ideas on ‘the social mind’, Rimbaud and the prospects for the euro? quite apart from getting livened up at least once a week by the company of clever, funny and nice academic colleagues.)

If the swallows decided to nest in the roof of our flats in Surbiton, that would be the perfect solution.

The year the swallows don’t return will feel like the end of the world.

London, Berlin, Mexico

What a week for treats I could have had in very few other places than London.

Sometimes I fantasise about a move to the country (where I've never lived), partly in preparation for the coming breakdown of environment and society, which may or may not happen, in my lifetime or for years after, but more because I love views of landscape and having birds around other than the magpies, gulls and pigeons that are all we get in Surbiton apart from the occasional parakeet. (I've saw a single swift on a couple of occasions, and distant swallow once or twice.)

But then I think about the stuff I've been able to do this week by virtue of living in London (on the outer edge but with fast, frequent and free trains to the centre).

Here are the highlights.

Monday evening: a conversation between six writers, historians, journalists and other experts on Berlin, the Wall and the division of Germany. Memorable readings from two autobiographical pieces about the East, comments out of long experience by Misha Glenny with a passionate appeal to make the EU work for the sake of the peace and security of Eastern Europe including the Balkans which should eventually be brought in, and a quite different account, quiet and thoughtful, by David Chipperfield the architect on his restoration -- or reconstitution -- of the Neues Museum, with slides.

Tuesday morning in the British Library, looking at stuff I've had on a list for a year or two. Lovely place to work and the system seems to work beautifully. Because I'd got something wrong in my ordering one item hadn’t been delivered so I'll be back today to get it -- they’re faxing it from Boston Spa, their depository outside Leeds (a talk by the LCC Chief Inspector of Schools in 1948 about the London School Plan.)

Tuesday evening: Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle at the ENO (English National Opera) -- the production got a bit silly but the singing and music were ravishing. I first discovered this opera (1908 0r 1911 as I remember -- that terrific exuberant, inventive, iconoclastic first phase of Modernism) in a tv series on 20th century music, Leaving Home, by Simon Rattle and his Birmingham Philharmonic on Channel 4. I taped it and later bought the DVDs and have replayed them several times. When does C4 do anything like that now?

Yesterday evening: the South Bank again for another conversations: Robert Service and Tristran Hunt on their biographies of Trotsky and Engels. This calls for a separate post. It was as terrific as all those ‘conversations’ on the South Bank are. I've been to loads and never a dud one.

What, in the country, I ask myself, would I be doing at the times when in London I have experiences like these? going for walks? enjoyable once in a while but when the weather’s dull they can be really boring. Gardening? I used to do that and a large part is mindless drudgery.

Could see myself rapidly declining into Marx’s (and Hazlitt’s) state of rural idiocy: fitter and healthier but bored and stupid. So here I stay for the next little while.

Absolute Beginners

I've mentioned that with colleagues I'm researching English teaching in London secondary schools from the end of the war to the mid-1960s. In that connection I've just been re-reading Colin MacInnes's 1959 cult novel Absolute Beginners. (England, Half English, above, is essays, but the cover would have suited the novel too. The picture's by Pat Fogarty.)

I can see why it was a cult novel and it still appeals on the third reading (the first having been, I suppose, soon after it came out). It's about the London scene in 1958 and culminates in the Notting Hill Riots. The narrator is 18 (19 at the end) and, very consciously and assertively, a teenager – a species of which he speaks as its would-be philosopher. The book is sharp on the social types and scenes he moves between, and lyrical on the fabric and feel of the city, its neighbourhoods and populations.

I went back to the book wondering how far the moods and attitudes it depicts would have been those of a proportion of the pupils in 'our' London schools and come up against a problem of plausibility. Not only is this a novel, it's a novel about an 18-year-old young man's expression of his distinctive, consciously adopted teenage identity written by a 45-year-old whose own youth was spent in an Australian public school and then, from age 16, in various employments in Europe.

Of course, in the late '50s MacInnes knew his London youth in so far as a middle-aged man could who hung out with those of them who went to certain coffee places, bars etc, and who had sex with not a few of the boys. (I know this from, amongst other sources, Tony Gould's biography, Inside Outsider.)

But it's clear that no-one who at 18 had been that working class kid with a useless 'elementary school' education (it must have been secondary modern) and coming from the childhood that's depicted could have either arrived at such clear and definite views on such a range of current issues, or articulated his views with such eloquence. The attitudes expressed are blatantly those of a liberal Guardian reader: extremely articulate about politics (despite despising the Parliamentary game), anti-capital punishment, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic (though less obviously anti-sexist). And above all he's already, at nearly 19, got everything worked out to the point of an announceable 'position'.

MacInnes has in fact written his idea of the ideal Teenage Manifesto as he wishes some teenager had written it but none actually did, and of course his wishes are those of a 45-year-old who had never been that sort of youth. Whether any 1958 teenager really was so insightful and certain is of course a matter for inquiry. The evidence would be diaries, letters or recordings from the time, and if any exist I'd love to know of them.

I looked at Tony Gould again and was surprised that he has nothing to say about the sheer implausibility of this character, nor about his strange style. It's impossible to believe, for instance, that the following was the subcultural style of any actual group of British youth; it's the dialogue from the first couple of pages:


IT WAS with the advent of the Laurie London era that I realized the whole teenage epic was tottering to doom.
'Fourteen years old, that absolute beginner,' I said to the Wizard as we paused casually in the gramophone section to hear Little Laurie in that golden disc performance of his.
'From now on,' said Wizard, 'he's certainly Got The Whole World In His Hands.'
We listened to the wonder boy's nostrils spinning on.
'They buy us younger every year,' I cried. 'Why, Little Mr L.'s voice hasn't even dropped yet, so who will those tax-payers try to kidnap next?
'Sucklings,' said Wizard. ….

The Wiz looked wise, like the middle feller of the three old monkeys.
'It's not the tax-payers,' he said, 'who are responsible. Ifs the kids themselves, for buying the EPs these elderly sordids bribe the teenage nightingales to wax.'
'No doubt,' I said, for I know better than ever to argue with the Wizard, or with anyone else who gets his kicks from an idea.
Mr Wiz continued, masticating his salmon sandwich for anyone to see, 'It's been a two-way twist, this teenage party. Exploitation of the kiddos by the conscripts, and exploitation of themselves by the crafty little absolute beginners. The net result? "Teenager"'s become a dirty word or, at any rate, a square one.'
I smiled at Mr W. 'Well, take it easy, son,' I said, 'because a sixteen year old sperm like you has got a lot of teenage living still to do. As for me, eighteen summers, rising nineteen, I'll very soon be out there among the oldies.'
The Wizard eyed me with his Somerset Maugham appearance. 'Me, boy,' he said, 'I tell you. As things are, I won't regret it when the teenage label's torn off the arse pockets of my drip-dry sky-blue jeans.'

I find it easier to believe in the argot of Alex and his Droogies in A Clockwork Orange.

Gould doesn't cite any serious critical accounts of Absolute Beginners except one, by Richard Wollheim in 1962, that I'm hoping to dig out from the library stack tomorrow. There must be lots of others but I haven't got round to hunting them out. But in any case, my interest at the moment is more sociological than literary: is this novel a fair, if over-articulate, representation of the attitudes of an influential section of London teenagers in 1958-9?

Monarchs of the Burbs

Inveterate Londoner that I am when I'm not sick of the place, this afternoon I engaged in one of London’s traditional urban pursuits.

Along the north side of the Thames at the western edge of London is a wide alluvial plain, conspicuously destined for early and permanent inundation.

Within this flat expanse one large area, fronting the river, was grabbed for the Tudor Hampton Court Palace and its ground; north of it is the even more extensive Bushy Park where a twenty-minute bike ride delivered me (from Surbiton, lower right), and within which another hour’s cycling on different paths was afforded. And deer-stalking.

Here, under the shade of well-spaced oaks

and amid the bracken, the deer doze or graze or thread their way between picnicking families and careering kiddy-bikes.

But I also brought back some sad pictures: those autumn tints in the row of horse-chestnuts near the Lion Gate are actually a wasting disease that’s afflicting the species in Britain, and that already half the trees have caught.

Special issue of The Victorian

Cathy Burke put me on to this. I tried to order this issue from the website of the Victorian Society but ended up infuriated and blasted off an email. Within five minutes I had a phone call from the President, Ian Dungavell, apologising for their ‘frightful’ website and saying he’d put a copy in the post himself, which indeed he did, with a nice note, and I ended up impressed. By the magazine, too – what a terrific cover, for a start.

Inside there’s this, of one of the classic T.J. Bailey London board schools, Kennington Road:

The school’s a classic in part because of its clear 7-part plan and elevation: working outwards, central hall on each floor (infants, girls, boys), staircase, cloakrooms and teachers’ rooms (notice how two fit in the height of the middle floor hall), and classrooms. Each element has a quite different roof treatment. The colour hasn’t come out too well in my copy of the photograph but you can see the distinctive London style: yellow stock brick with red brick to pick out corners, string courses and fancy bits.

There’s also an article about the Manchester Board Schools, which are somewhat different:

The top one is Crumpsal Road: red only (brick, with terracotta for the ornaments); two storeys, not three (did they have more land to spread out on?); five elements, not seven. The windows are very similar to London ones – large, white-painted, sash, some with rounded tops.



Personally I find all that red a bit oppressive, especially when it’s dirty as remember it used to be (like everything in northern cities when I was a kid).


Soon I want to go back to Bradford, where I grew up, to photograph the board schools which, like the houses, are of stone, in a style that is nothing like Queen Anne. Bradford was one of the most progressive school boards in the country, strongly socialist in direction, so the schools were of high quality. My last visit was before I was interested in school buildings, and my photography wasn’t a success in any case. All I got of my junior school, Horton Bank Top, were these -- I hope it's still there when I go back:

Another mysterious school

The District line of the London Underground sends a probe without much conviction from Earls Court into South London, crossing the river at Putney. I took this line from Wimbledon to Kensington High Street to buy a rucksack, since that street has the biggest branches of Millets, Blacks and Ellis Brigham. On the way there I was excited (such is the phase I'm currently in) to see the back and one end of a fine school building from the raised section of track between Putney Bridge and Parsons Green. It was classic School Board for London so I attempted to take photos on the way back.

[All images -- click to enlarge]

Today I found it on the bike and photographed the front. It’s flats now; recent building and security make it impossible to get round the sides or into the playground at the back.


But what is this school? It’s on New King’s Road, Fulham, and as I said is classic SBL: look at its standard 7-part symmetrical construction, each function (classrooms, mezzanine teachers’ rooms and cloakrooms, staircases and halls) separately displayed through the articulation of the elevation to provide interest along the street frontage. (The simple line of the back, as seen in the shots from the train – a line of classrooms on each floor, varied only by the shaping of the gables – wouldn’t have been tolerated by the architects at the front.)

I now have with me the final report of the School Board for London, published in 1904 before they were disbanded, to be replaced by the Education Committee of the London County Council.

It’s a beautiful production of 378 pages with much of the information I've been trying to get from more obscure sources, including a complete list of SBL schools and pull-out maps. Imagine some public body now going to that sort of trouble before being closed down.

The list and maps clear up a number of my puzzles, but not this one. On the relevant map school on New King’s Road doesn’t appear.

You see Putney Bridge. North of that New King's Road curves east. The school is in that first triangle formed by the road and the District Railway.

The school’s absence leads me to wonder whether it was built after the end of the SBL, in the early days of the LCC’s school building programme – the architect was the same, T.J. Bailey.

Bailey designed for the early LCC education authority the surviving 1905 building on the Mina Road site of what is now Walworth Academy and was Walworth (comprehensive) School, where I once worked. There was talk of the new Academy (it took over last September) demolishing this handsome building, but I see from the Southwark Council planning applications website that it is to be preserved. Good!

Here’s the brochure for opening ceremony:

You can see that a wall originally divided the boys' from the girls' playground. They had separate entrances, the girls to the ground floor and the boys to a staircase to the first floor.

‘Queen Anne’ and the London School Board

Those interested in other matters, forgive me for the moment. I'm on a roll with the school board and its buildings.

Click to enlarge

That's Lavender Hill School, Clapham Junction, 1891.

The School Board for London (SBL) took the appearance of their schools seriously. (Contrast many more recent education authorities.) From their final report:

'The policy of the School Board has almost always been to give these buildings, as public buildings, some dignity of appearance, and make them ornaments rather than disfigurements to the neighbourhood in which they are erected.... It was found that the difference of cost between bare utilitarianism and buildings designed in some sort of style and with regard for materials and colour was rather less than 5 per cent. At the same time this ornamental appearance may be secured either by richness of detail or by a dignified grouping of masses; it is the policy of the Board, while studying in the first instance suitable arrangements for teaching, not to set aside the dignity and attractiveness of buildings which the Board have always felt should be a contrast to their poor surroundings.’

Each SBL school is unique and there is great variety in their architecture. Nevertheless, the dominant style is the one called ‘Queen Anne’. The SBL’s first architect, E.R. Robson, explaining that the need for cheapness dictated the use of brick and that the search had been made for the most suitable brick style from London’s past, wrote:

'the only really simple brick style available as a foundation is that of the time of the Jameses, Queen Anne and the early Georges, whatever some enthusiasts may think of its value in point of art.’

The introduction of this style into school buildings is attributed, though not universally, to Robson’s assistant John J. Stevenson, who wrote in justification of it:

'Take the ordinary conditions of London building -- stock bricks and sliding sash windows. A flat arch of red cut bricks is the cheapest mode of forming a window-head: the red colour is naturally carried down the sides of the window, forming a frame: and is used also to emphasise the angles of the building. As the gables rise above the roofs it costs nothing, and gives interest and character... to mould them into curves and sweeps. The appearance of wall surface carried over the openings, which, in Gothic, the tracery and iron bars and reflecting surface of thick stained glass had taught us to appreciate, is obtained by massive wooden frames and sash bars set, where the silly interference of the Building Act does not prevent, almost flush with the walls, while to the rooms inside these thick sash bars give a feeling of enclosure and comfort. With these simple elements the style is complete, without any expenditure whatever on ornament. ... there is nothing but harmony and proportion to depend on for effect. We may, if we have money to spare, get horizontal division of the facade, in this style as in Gothic, by string courses and cornices, and we have the advantage over Gothic that we can obtain vertical division by pilasters…. The style in all its forms has the merit of truthfulness; it is the outcome of our common modern wants picturesquely expressed. In its mode of working and details it is the common vernacular style in which the British workman has been apprenticed, with some new life from Gothic added….'

Lavender Hill School again.

All the above quotes from Kelsall’s chapter in Ringshall, R., Miles, M., Dame, & Kelsall, F. (1983). The urban school : buildings for education in London, 1870-1980. London: Greater London Council in association with Architectural Press.

So what was this Queen Anne style, and what was it that those ‘enthusiasts’ Robson mentions said about it? Here’s a modern historian of Victorian architecture, Mark Girouard:

''Queen Anne' has comparatively little to do with Queen Anne. It was the nickname applied to a style which became enormously popular in the 1870s and survived into the early years of this century. 'Queen Anne' came with red brick and white-painted sash windows, with curly pedimented gables and delicate brick panels of sunflowers, swags, or cherubs, with small window panes, steep roofs, and curving bay windows, with wooden balconies and little fancy oriels jutting out where one would least expect them. It was a kind of architectural cocktail, with a little genuine Queen Anne in it, a little Dutch, a little Flemish, a squeeze of Robert Adam, a generous dash of Wren, and a touch of François I"er. It combined all these elements and a number of others into a mixture that had a strong character of its own -- particularly when they were mixed with skill and gaiety, as they very often were.

The mixture can easily be savoured today, for the style survives in large quantities. 'Queen Anne' covers large stretches of Chelsea, from Pont Street and Cadogan Square down to the Embankment. It breaks out in islands of red brick amid the stucco seas of Kensington and Bayswater; in houses built for artists or the artistic in Hampstead and Bedford Park; in riverside residences or seaside hotels, lively with balconies, turrets, gables, and green copper domes; in the pink and white daintiness of Newnham College, Cambridge, and the immediately recognizable silhouettes of the early London Board Schools….

It was a style which set out to please, and yet it was greeted on its appearance with howls of anger or derision. 'A bastard style', 'a contortion of every feature of architecture', 'abject copyism', 'effete feebleness and prettiness', 'excessively ugly', 'a regular tea-tray style', 'disgrace of the country', 'entirely contradicting the taste and feeling of the day', 'baneful influence over students', 'brilliant but dangerous', 'utterly commonplace' were among the expressions used about it. There were acrimonious and heated discussions wherever architects were gathered together. Aged Academicians wrote furious letters to the newspapers. The public were not deterred, and took to it with almost excessive enthusiasm.'

Starting in 1870 with no useful English precedents, the architects of the School Board for London invented a building type that worked admirably, and, suitably modified, still does. Here’s why, according to Girouard, it was so successful:

‘The 'Queen Anne' Board Schools succeeded because they were cheap, convenient, attractive, and easily recognizable. They were built on small budgets and usually on constricted sites. They were planned in accordance with the educational standards of the day, which required complete separation of boys from girls, as well as separate, co-educational infant schools. All three divisions had to have their own big schoolroom in which all members of the division could be seated, as well as large separate classrooms. The prevalent pupil-teacher system, which meant that many of the teachers had to be supervised as much as the children, made it desirable that it should be easy to see from one classroom into another, and from the schoolroom into the classrooms. Other requirements included lavatories, cloakrooms, teachers' rooms, a certain amount of covered but not enclosed space for playgrounds in wet weather, openings to either side of the classrooms to provide cross-ventilation, thirty square inches of glass to each square foot of floor, and (for reasons which remain obscure) a ceiling height of at least fourteen feet for both classrooms and schoolrooms.’

(Not sure what this school was. It's on the same site as Lavender Hill but seems earlier.)

The board schools didn’t just work; they proved powerful symbols.

‘Towering above terraces of little houses all over London, the Board Schools captured the imagination of the public as impressive and immediately recognizable symbols of enlightenment. They also helped to convert it to ‘Queen Anne’, as the style of the moment and the style of progress.’

Imagine a new building style today starting with schools and spreading to all public buildings, pubs, office buildings and even houses!

Girouard, M. (1977). Sweetness and Light. The Queen Anne Movement 1860-1900. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

School Board Schools again

There should be a picture book – a coffee table book, huge -- of all the nearly 500 schools built by the School Board for London, from 1970 until 1904 when they were superseded by the London County Council. It would have photographs, plans if they have survived, dates, names of architects and previous names of the schools.

I'd then have an easier time with school like the one that I photographed near Clapham Junction the other day. I'd often seen it from the train and wanted to investigate. The plaque on the door of the apartment block (which it now is) read

[click to enlarge]

but I've no easy way of knowing what the school actually used to be.



Handsome, isn't it - and distinctively SBL: the two colours of bricks, the large white-painted windows, the articulated frontage comprising a number of distinct elements, the minimal decoration but a bit of a flourish at the top level. This was known as the Queen Anne style. What was the school originally called?

School Board schools usually had a plaque like

but this school doesn’t.

However, it may originally have had a plaque because I think the school may have been part destroyed by bombs. Alternatively it was never completed. I think what we see isn't the whole thing partly because I could find only an Infants entrance
and no Boys or Girls entrance. These may, of course, have been at the back where security prevented me from going. Elementary schools had, from the bottom floor, three 'departments' for Infants, Girls and Boys. Girls and Boys had separate staircases.

Another indication of uncompletess is the front elevation:

[Do click to enlarge, won't you?]

Working from the left here we see

1. A classroom section, the most decorated, with rooms in the roof and the gable at the front
2. A narrow, set-back staircase section with small mezzanine (teachers’) rooms
3. A 4-part unit of classrooms (facing east, the preferred side; at the back there would have been a hall on each floor).

Shouldn’t we then get the equivalents of 1 and 2 again, repeated in reverse order? That would be the standard SBL symmetrical model, as in Cobbold Road School (said to be in Chelsea though there’s no Cobbold Road in Chelsea now; perhaps Chelsea referred to a big electoral division that also served as one of the Board's divisions. I must go and look at the school I can see on the map at Cobbold Road in Chiswick or Acton.)

Here’s Cobbold Road from a pre-1902 photograph and architect’s plans - note the symmetry:
That’s from School Buildings by Felix Clay, 1902. The architect named, T.J. Bailey, was the second architect of the SBL and the first of the LCC. Clay says of Cobbold Road School that ‘This example may be considered a typical plan of the modern Elementary School as built by the London School Board.’

And, speaking of symmetry, going back to the Clapham Junction school shouldn’t that bay 3 (of 4) in element 3, with its double window on the second floor, be at the centre of the frontage? Doesn't it suggest almost half the building is missing?

If I now look again at my photograph of Walworth Lower School (blog of 10th March) in the light of Clay and later studies, I note that this building too is clearly incomplete. Here it is again:
The work on the left end is really rough. That was the first school I worked in. All the time I worked there, and even when I took the photograph last month, I never realised it had been bombed or left half-built. (The latter is quite possible: T.J. Bailey designed his schools in discrete sections so they could be built in stages, as the population expanded. So presumably there were places where the population didn’t expand and the school was never finished.)

Walworth Lower School, formerly Nelson Secondary Modern School, originally Sandford Row School

was exactly on the plan of Cobbold Road School, except it had two classrooms, not three, in the end element – and had one end missing. It had the key features of the fully evolved SBL elementary school: three storeys each with a hall, two classrooms off each hall with glass partition (through which the headteacher – one for each department: I, G, B – could supervise the pupil-teachers or assistants), a classroom directly opposite the stairs off the landing and two or three classrooms at the end. I could mark on Bailey's plan the equivalent two classrooms I taught in on the second floor.

(Classrooms were an imported German idea; the English tradition was to teach the whole school in one room – the schoolroom.)

Each classroom was designed to take 60 pupils, with high ceilings (partly to ventilate the fumes from the gas lights), windows that opened easily and a fireplace. Well-built, sound-proof, light and spacious – and in my experience never surpassed. And this was what the School Board built for the unwashed plebs; imagine what the middle-class grammar school pupil got (though they were outside the school boards' brief).

Well, you don’t have to imagine. We know from Clay’s book and often from our own experience. Those schools were designed for classes of 30 and had playing fields. Requiring more space, they tended to be built in the less densely populated suburbs where land was available and cheaper.

The first London elementary schools

Click to enlarge

Awesome find on eBay -- though unfortunately it's a facsimile edition (Leicester University Press, 1972). Beautiful printing, with engravings and woodcuts.

Robson was the first architect of the School Board for London. The Board was elected in November 1870 -- direct elections: this wasn't a committee of the council (there wasn't a council). The Board was truly impressive. They lost no time and in 6 months had appointed a Works Committee and Robson as architect. More on the SBL another time.

Notice the date, then: 1874 is really early in the life of the School Board. (It was replaced by the London County Council in 1904). But already some schools had been built, to the high standard that the SBL and LCC kept up until 1914. (Note also that the school building was called the school-house: the term referred to the school, not the teacher's or caretaker's house.)

The school illustrated, West Street School, Hackney, was an early SBL school type. It has the familiar three storeys: from the bottom, infants, girls and boys, the three departments, as they were called. At this stage each floor would consist, apart from cloakrooms etc., of a single school-room (or hall), each housing the pupils (at desks in various configurations), the teacher and some pupil-teachers (aged 14 and over). One experimental school had been built with classrooms, a Prussian idea, but Robson found this model expensive and inefficient. At best the school-room might sometimes be divided with curtains.

Later, though, the SBL and Robson came round to the idea of classrooms, divided from the hall (the former school-room) and the landings by glass partitions, so that the teacher could easily supervise the pupil-teachers and any assistant teachers.

I'll do another entry on Robson and desks!

London schools

Today I went for a walk around part of Southwark -- SE17, a familiar haunt where I had my first teaching job. By the time I reached the school, Walworth, the light was poor and I was getting wet. Nevertheless...

That's the back as I approached from Dawes Street. Advancing a bit further...


This view didn't use to be possible -- a few streets have since been removed.

The school was built not by Southwark, not by the LCC who ran education in London from 1903 but by the School Board for London, a directly elected body resulting from the Forster Education Act of 1870. In no time at all (well, thirty years) they built what must be hundreds of schools like this in dense areas of London for a population most of which had never been to school before. The SBL was an impressive outfit.

These were elementary schools, for children from 5-12, though many left before 12.


That's the original name. Later (1945, I imagine) it became the Nelson Secondary Modern School, then the lower school of Walworth Secondary School (comprehensive) and now it's the lower school of the new Walworth Academy.

It's the best school building I ever worked in. Well-built, spacious, high ceilings, high windows, adaptable for different teaching methods, fine brick architecture based on 17th and 18th English styles. And the staffroom had a fireplace, with a fire lit every morning at 8 by Mrs Arnold, the schoolkeeper's wife, who also put the kettle on. The classrooms had had fireplaces too, but these had been boarded up.

What it didn't have was a playing field -- only grammar schools (often called secondary schools) had them, and a different architecture -- more Gothic or more classical -- to make clear that they were for fee-paying middle class children, and those select working-class children who got scholarships out of the elementary schools and whose parents were prepared to keep them on to 15.