The Longmore Centre

THE LONGMORE CENTRE

Originally Hale's Grammar School, this building was founded in 1617 by Richard Hale of King's Walden under letters patent granted by James I. The school has since served as a teacher training centre and County Council Offices.

The structure is early 17th century in origin, with substantial 19th-century alterations, extensions added in 1930–31, and repairs following war damage sustained in 1944. It is constructed of red-brown brick laid in English and Flemish bonds, with 20th-century clay tiled roofs.

The building comprises a seven-bay open classroom (now subdivided) with an attic above, and a two-storey central gabled cross wing. The ground floor displays four 19th-century timber three-light moulded mullioned windows with oblong and fishscale patterned leaded lights, set below brick dripmoulds with moulded brick sills. Similar windows appear on the ground and attic floors of the end elevations and south elevation, with smaller two and three-light windows of comparable detail on the projecting cross wing. The north side features a doorway with a four-centred arch, moulded brick intrados and jambs, and an external dripmould.

The roof is crowned by a late 19th-century hexagonal timber cupola with lead-covered base and lead-covered ogee profile cap, positioned over the north porch. Two large gabled brick dormers with three-light casement windows sit below brick dripmoulds. The chimneystacks are particularly notable: tall double-shafted octagonal brick chimneys to the left of the south porch rise above an external chimneybreast with moulded base and oversailing caps—a conjectured 19th-century restoration. A south porch is now covered by a flat-roofed link to a south wing, both constructed in 1930–31 and of no particular architectural interest.

Internally, the main classroom retains its mid-19th-century restored appearance, with cased beams, boarded dado, and windows with pegged frames with ovolo mouldings. The south porch contains a late 19th-century Jacobean-style staircase with closed string, newels with finial caps, column and bobbin balusters, and moulded handrail, featuring an arcaded landing. The west attic room displays a three-bay division with exposed collars and rafters and butt purlins set alternatively up and down. The east attic roof contains 19th-century trusses, repaired after wartime damage. The western roof spans with halved and pegged rafters without a ridge board, showing mortices for collars at a higher level than the present ceiling.

The building was administered by the Mayor and 9 Chief Burgesses of Hertford. By the 19th century it housed a single open classroom with long rows of desks and a master's desk at each end. The notable naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, was educated here in the 1830s. Around 1900 the school came under County Council control and became known as Hertford Grammar School. By 1930, having become wholly inadequate, a new County Grammar School was constructed on Hale Road; the original front door with its arched moulded frame and the date '1667' in studded nailheads was removed to the new building, where it remains.

The original building was extended in 1931 and renamed Longmore Senior Girls School, after Sir Charles Elton Longmore, Clerk to Hertfordshire County Council from 1894 to 1930. It subsequently served as an annexe to a Secondary Modern School built on London Road in 1957. The east wing suffered damage in a 1944 air raid and remained partly derelict until its restoration in 1958.