Queens Manor School With Associated School Keeper'S House, Boundary Wall, Entrance Arches, Outdoor Wcs And Play Sheds

Queens Manor School with Associated School Keeper's House, Boundary Wall, Entrance Arches, Outdoor WCs and Play Sheds

This is a board school built in 1903-4 by Thomas James Bailey for the School Board for London. The building has later additions which lack special interest.

Materials and Construction

The school is constructed of red brick with buff terracotta dressings, and has a red tile roof. The windows are mainly white-painted timber sashes.

Plan

The school has three storeys. Each floor features a large central hall facing west, with classrooms and twin staircases to the east. Corridors run north and south from the hall, connecting to further classrooms and additional staircases. These outer staircases access small mezzanine floors that overlook the ground- and first-floor corridors, while the hall staircases lead up to the former art room in the attic space above the hall block. Beneath the central block are a boiler room and coal cellar.

Exterior

The east front facing Woodlawn Road has a projecting gabled centrepiece containing twin entrances at ground level, with four tiers of staircase windows above recessed within two tall arches. Above these rises a steep pediment gable containing a row of small windows set behind a miniature Tuscan colonnade. The end bays project slightly and also have pediment gables. The left-hand gable contains a round window with scrollwork ornament, and below it a large plaque bearing the school's foundation date.

The windows of the linking classroom blocks show progressively more ornamental treatment: flat brick arches at ground floor level, terracotta aprons and keystones on the first floor, and moulded architraves on the top floor beneath a continuous frieze and dentil cornice. The short north and south elevations receive similar treatment.

The west elevation has a projecting central hall block of five bays with shaped gables and a mansard roof, flanked by lower stair towers topped with Diocletian windows and balustrades. The end bays resemble those on the east front. The sections linking these to the central block contain five tiers of small windows lighting the mezzanine floors. The building has six original entrances, two each inscribed 'BOYS', 'GIRLS' and 'INFANTS' in the lintels.

To the west of the school stands a mid-20th century classroom block of timber construction, linked to the main school via a brick corridor. There is a small brick extension to the kitchen at the north-west corner of the building, and a timber porch over the recently-created nursery entrance at the south-east corner. These later additions are not of special interest.

Interior

The interiors are of standard Board School type, enlivened by moulded round-arched fireplaces at either end of the three halls, and smaller fireplaces and panelled cupboards that survive in many of the classrooms. Two of the mezzanine-level offices contain fireplaces with slightly more ornamental timber surrounds, and there is a much larger fireplace with a green tiled surround in the entrance hall. The third-floor classrooms have exposed timber roof trusses, as does the art room in the attic space.

The outer staircases are lined with brown glazed brick and have metal balustrades to their upper flights. Internal windows and glazed screens separate the various rooms, most of which retain hardwood block floors and tiled dados, the latter now painted over.

Subsidiary Features

The site includes a stock-brick boundary wall with red-brick piers, each bearing an ornamental terracotta ball. Two pairs of entrance arches for boys and girls stand to north and south, constructed of banded red brick and terracotta with wrought-iron gates and railings. Outdoor WCs and open-sided play sheds are built against the boundary wall. At the north-east corner of the site stands a two-storey school keeper's house of red brick and terracotta, with triangular gables and shaped dormers.

Historical Context

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 the education of children aged 5-13. A driving force behind the legislation was the need for a literate and numerate workforce to ensure Britain remained at the forefront of manufacture and commerce. The extension of the franchise to the urban working classes in the 1867 Reform Act also 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, managed by elected school boards. The School Board of London, founded in 1870, was the first and most influential. It was one of the first truly democratic elected bodies in Britain, with both women and members of the working classes serving on the board. The Board 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, as demonstrated by its passing of a by-law in 1871 compelling parents to send children to school, a decade before this became compulsory nationally in 1880.

By the Edwardian period, the London School Board's achievements meant 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 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 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', epitomising the reformers' confidence in the power of universal education to transform society. The striking design of many of these schools illustrates this special history.

Queens Manor School is listed at Grade II as an especially imposing and well-preserved example of a London Board School, built at the end of the School Board period and exemplifying Thomas James Bailey's move towards more dramatic, Baroque-influenced forms. It retains an unusually complete ensemble of ancillary structures including an ornamental boundary wall, entrance gateways, playground sheds, toilet blocks and school keeper's house.