Former Peterborough School Including School Keeper'S Cottage (No. 60), Entrance Gates, Sheds And Wcs

This board school was built in 1903-4 to a design by Thomas James Bailey, architect to the School Board for London. It comprises the main school building with its original school keeper's cottage at number 60 Clancarty Road, entrance gates, sheds and toilet blocks. Later additions to the school are of no special interest.

Construction and Materials

The building is constructed of stock brick with a blue-brick plinth. Red brick and buff terracotta provide the decorative dressings. The roof is red tile, crowned with a timber and lead cupola. Windows are mainly white-painted timber sashes.

Layout

The school rises three storeys. Each floor has a large south-facing hall in the central block, with classrooms to the north, and corridors running east and west giving access to further classrooms, toilets and twin staircases at front and rear. The attic space above the hall contains the former art room. The ground- and first-floor link blocks have mezzanines reached by separate staircases. Below the central block is a boiler room and coal cellar.

Exterior

Bailey designed the building in a Free Renaissance style, making extensive decorative use of red brick and terracotta. The south front facing Clancarty Road features a central hall block with crenellated parapet. Its five bays are divided by red-brick piers with terracotta volutes and niche finials. Twin stair towers with finials and shaped gables flank this central block, the eastern tower having a timber belfry attached to its upper stage. Link blocks of five lower storeys connect to gabled outer wings faced in red brick. The left-hand gable bears a terracotta plaque with the school's original name and foundation date.

The north front has similar gabled outer wings. Between them are tall shaped half-dormers and a central pair of triangular gables, both with banded jambs. Similar gables and dormers appear on the shorter east and west elevations. The west elevation has a small single-storey flat-roofed extension, and a much larger gabled extension has recently been built to the north; these lack special interest. Entrances with lintels inscribed BOYS, GIRLS and INFANTS indicate the former arrangement of the school.

Interior

The interiors follow the standard board-school type. Exposed steel girders support the hall ceilings, and timber roof trusses span the second-floor and attic classrooms. Skylights illuminate the second-floor corridors, while those on the ground and first floors are overlooked by mezzanine offices, two of which contain fireplaces with simple timber surrounds. Internal windows and glazed screens separate the various rooms. Most rooms retain hardwood block floors and tiled dados, the latter now painted over. The stairwells are faced in white glazed brick and have metal balustrades to their upper flights.

A panelled oak Great War memorial stands in the second-floor hall. Several boys' and girls' honours boards, recording scholarships awarded between 1906 and 1927, are displayed in the western first-floor corridor and south-west stairwell. The ground floor classroom wing adjoining the hall has recently been opened up to form a second dining hall.

Subsidiary Features

The school keeper's cottage at number 60 Clancarty Road is of stock brick with a roughcast upper storey and a tiled gabled roof. In the north-eastern and north-western corners of the playground stand toilet blocks and open-sided sheds. Sturdy timber entrance gates with wrought-iron overthrows are set into the modern boundary fence on Clancarty Road. All these subsidiary features are of special interest.

History

The London School Board established the Peterborough School in 1901 in this building designed by the Board's architect, Thomas James Bailey. Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council closed the school in 2007. Half the building was leased to a French-language school, the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, and the other half taken over by another local primary school, Queensmill.

The Elementary Education Act of 1870, steered through Parliament by William Forster and known as 'Forster's Act', was the first to establish a national, secular, non-charitable provision for educating children aged 5 to 13. A driving force behind the new legislation was the need for a literate and numerate workforce to ensure Britain remained at the forefront of manufacture and commerce. Moreover, the extension of the franchise to the urban working classes in the 1867 Reform Act alerted politicians to the need to, in words attributed to the then Chancellor, 'educate our masters'. The Act required partially state-funded elementary schools to be established in areas where existing provision was inadequate, to be managed by elected school boards.

The School Board of London was the first to be founded, in 1870, and the most influential. The Board was one of the first truly democratic elected bodies in Britain, with both women and members of the working classes serving. It comprised 49 members under the chairmanship of the former Viceroy of India, Lord Lawrence, and included five members of parliament, eleven clergymen, the scientist Thomas Huxley, suffragists Emily Davies (an educationalist) and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (a doctor), and a working-class cabinetmaker, Benjamin Lucraft. The Board's politics were ambitious and progressive, epitomised by its passing of a by-law in 1871 compelling parents to send children to school; this was not compulsory nationally until 1880.

Such was the achievement of the London School Board in the last quarter of the 19th century that by the Edwardian period few neighbourhoods in London were without a red brick, Queen Anne style, three-storey school designed by Edward Robert Robson, the Board's architect, or his successor Thomas James Bailey. The Board's adoption of the newly-fashionable Queen Anne style was a significant departure from the Gothic Revival deemed appropriate to educational buildings up until that point, and created a distinctive and highly influential board school aesthetic. Around 500 board schools were built in London, many in densely-populated, poor areas where they were, and often remain, the most striking buildings in their locales.

The Board did not escape criticism, both on the grounds of expense to rate-payers and for potentially radicalising the urban poor through secular education. Yet its supporters were unapologetic. Charles Booth, justifying the expense of more elaborate schools in the East End, stated: 'It was necessary to strike the eye and hold the imagination. It was worth much to carry high the flag of education, and this is what has been done. Each school stands up from its playground like a church in God's acre, ringing its bell'. Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Naval Treaty' (1894) also lauded the new metropolitan landmarks as 'Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future', thus epitomising the reformers' confidence in the power of universal education to transform society. The striking design of many of these schools is illustrative of this special history.