Fulham Cross School And School Keeper'S House

Fulham Cross School is a girls' secondary school built in 1907–8 by Thomas James Bailey for the London County Council. It originally opened as Fulham Secondary School for Girls. The building has undergone minor later alterations. Late 20th-century buildings to the west of the main school building are not included in this listing.

Construction and Materials

The school is built of stock brick and red brick with Portland stone dressings. The main roof is tiled, with some lead and copper roofs. Windows are white-painted timber.

Layout

The school has four main floors with a mezzanine to the rear. The ground and first floors follow a standard Board School plan: a large hall occupies the central block, surrounded on three sides by classrooms, with through corridors in the wings. Two staircase towers project at the rear, and further staircases (now disused) are located in the re-entrant angles where the wings project forward. The second floor has a gallery running around three sides of the hall void. The third floor mirrors the ground floor plan but has classrooms in place of the hall. Small rooms occupy the tops of the stair towers.

Principal Front

The principal east front has projecting end wings with shaped gables flanked by red brick piers. Small ground-floor projections with ogee lead-capped roofs project from each wing. The north wing is fully fenestrated with rectangular six-over-six-paned sashes. The south wing is largely blank except for an enriched circular window in the gable and, below it, a rectangular stone plaque carved with the London County Council's monogram and the date and original name of the school.

The central block between the wings has twin entrance porches in the re-entrant angles. At ground floor level, six round-headed windows with keystones sit between these porches. Above these are six double-height round-headed windows with stone surrounds; the lower halves have sliding sashes and the upper halves have pivoting circular casements. The top floor has three Diocletian windows of double breadth under stone-capped gables.

Rear Elevation

The rear west elevation rises five storeys including the mezzanine. Projecting stair towers dominate this elevation: they are square at the base and semicircular above, terminating in copper half-domes. Originally there were no rear entrances. These have now been created by means of an external stair leading to a doorway in the southern stair tower, and an angled access corridor connecting via the base of the northern tower to a large red brick extension to the east. Between these towers, the ground floor of the central block is obscured by an infill classroom extension with a saw-toothed roof.

Above this infill extension, the low mezzanine storey has six segmental-headed windows with elongated keystones. Above these are two tiers of six rectangular sash windows. The top tier has square sashes punctuated by two taller cross-casement windows rising into dormers, each topped by one short pier and one tall chimney.

Side Elevations

The fully-fenestrated side elevations are relatively plain but are enlivened by half-octagonal projections with balustraded parapets.

Interior

The school's interior differs crucially from the Board School norm. Instead of having three or four single-storey halls, one on each floor of the central block, it has only two: one single-height hall of the usual type (now the library) on the ground floor, and above it a lofty double-height space with a gallery running round it on three sides, lit by the tall round-headed windows of the east front.

This upper hall is richly treated, with classical arcades (now blocked up) on three sides opening to the corridors and classrooms behind. Elaborate scrolled brackets support the balcony and principal roof beams. The balustrades to the balcony and upper galleries (the latter also now blocked) have simple ironwork panels and hardwood handrails. The floor is laid with hardwood blocks in a herringbone pattern.

The other interiors are much plainer and conform more closely to the Board School type. On ground level the floor has been raised and the ceiling lowered in many places, including the former lower hall, thus blocking access to the disused front staircases. Some features survive, however, including the glass and timber entrance lobbies and, in a sunken section of the central block, a cloakroom with timber matchboard partitions and numbered pegs, and a toilet block with four original cubicles. The mezzanine floor is likewise much altered, but retains another cloakroom with more partitions and pegs.

The first-floor hall has already been described. In the headteacher's office in the south wing projection there is a fireplace with a timber mantelpiece and tiled surround. On the second floor there are original studwork partitions separating the classrooms, and an original toilet cubicle in the south wing projection. The classrooms in the central section have windows (now blocked) opening onto the balcony.

The third floor has no hall, its place taken by further classrooms. The classrooms in the outer ranges have exposed roof trusses, and the corridors linking them are lit by skylights. In the north range there is another surviving toilet cubicle and more numbered coat-hooks. The stair towers have glazed brown brick walls and hardwood handrails.

Schoolkeeper's House

In the north-east corner of the site, abutting number 287 Munster Road, is a Schoolkeeper's House. This has a rendered upper storey over a brick base, with segment-headed upper windows (some of whose timber sashes have been replaced in uPVC) rising through the eaves of its slated hipped roof. To the south it has a square single-storey entrance projection, fully fenestrated with a curving lead roof.

Outbuilding

To the rear of the school is a contemporary outbuilding, probably a toilet block, with a glazed and louvred roof. This is of lesser interest, having been partly engulfed in the late 20th-century extensions.

History

The school has remained a single-sex secondary school since it opened in 1908. It changed its name to Fulham Gilliatt in 1973 and to Fulham Cross in 1981. Each change marked a merger with another school, requiring a series of extensions to be added to the rear of the main building.

The pioneering Elementary Education Act of 1870 laid the foundations for a national, secular, non-charitable education system for children aged 5–13. In London, under the aegis of the London School Board and its principal architects Edward Robert Robson and his successor Thomas James Bailey, several hundred 'Board Schools' were built. Most conformed to a standardised three- or four-storey plan and a readily identifiable 'house style' that evolved from Queen Anne revival under Robson towards a more Baroque-influenced Edwardian Free Renaissance under Bailey.

Secondary education, meanwhile, remained a largely haphazard affair, provided by a great multiplicity of private, 'public', grammar and technical schools. Some were eligible for public support, in the form of grants and scholarships from a variety of state sources, in return for taking in poorer pupils from the Board's elementary system.

Pressure from reformers such as Charles Booth and Sidney Webb led to a series of local and national inquiries during the 1890s, most notably the Bryce Commission of 1894. These made sweeping recommendations for the restructuring of secondary education, leading to the creation of a unified Board of Education to replace the various public funding and advisory bodies, and—under the 1902 Education Act—transferring authority for both elementary and secondary schooling to the newly-constituted Local Education Authorities.

In the capital, this meant that the London County Council, in addition to taking over elementary school provision from the School Board in 1903, also began to establish its own 'county' secondary schools towards the end of the decade. These were single-sex institutions providing education up to the age of 16 or 18. Many of these evolved out of the 'higher-grade' Board Schools. This, and the continuity of Thomas James Bailey as the London County Council's chief school architect until 1910, meant that the early secondary schools tended to resemble their Board School predecessors in plan and appearance.

Significance

Fulham Cross School is of architectural interest as one of the best and least altered of the school buildings designed by Thomas James Bailey for the London School Board and London County Council. Its main east front is a powerful composition that gives strong expression to the arrangement of internal spaces. The double-height main hall is especially rich and well-proportioned in comparison to the utilitarian interiors of other schools of the period. It is of particular historic interest as an early example of a purpose-built state secondary school.