Hanover Primary School And Railings, Panelled Walls And Gatepiers To Front (North) Elevation

Hanover Primary School is an elementary school, now serving as a primary school, built in 1931-2 by the London County Council Architects Department. A small extension added to the rear in the early 21st century is not of special interest.

The school is constructed of yellow stock brick with mixed red and blue brick and Portland stone dressings. The hipped roofs of the roof-top playground shelters are tiled. The original wooden windows were mostly replaced with uPVC copies in 2008, including the French windows to the open-air classrooms.

The building has a linear plan with single-banked open-air classrooms to the south of an axial corridor. Originally there were six classrooms on each floor, but alterations to the internal partitions have reduced this to four. Slightly angled end pavilion blocks contain halls to the east and, originally, practical workshops to the west, with an additional infants class on the ground floor. Separately expressed staircase blocks on the principal façade stand between the classroom block and end pavilions. These blocks have an additional storey at the front of the building, rising above the large roof-top playground to provide its shelters and staircase access.

The school is built below the level of Noel Road on a terrace next to the Regent's Canal, with entrance to the building from the road at first-floor level. It has three storeys with a roof-top playground. The principal north elevation to Noel Road is in a loose Arts and Crafts style with five bays, each treated separately. The central bay is set back behind a portico formed of four tall square piers of mixed red and blue brick, with an additional rectangular pier to the east atop the boiler room. This pier contains the boiler chimney which rises above the parapet with a corbelled projection. The fenestration behind the portico has interspersed large and small square-headed windows on the second floor, with decorative plaques bearing floral motifs below and the central window expressed as a shallow corbelled bay. There are regularly spaced segmental arched windows to the first floor and square-headed windows to the ground floor.

Either side of the central bay are two entrance bays containing the principal entrances to the school and main staircases. These are articulated externally with a Portland stone zig-zag step design between the second and attic (rooftop playground) floors. The entrances are each given different treatment. The boys' entrance in the western block has brick piers with a stone cornice and plaques below with floral designs and a "BOYS ENTRANCE" inscription. The girls' entrance in the eastern block has a terracotta surround inscribed "GIRLS" on the lintel with a simple stone hood, above which is a floral plaque below a square-headed window with a Portland stone surround.

The windows of the western bay to the workroom block are segmental arched to the upper floors, in threes with a narrow central window, and there are two square-headed windows on the ground floor. The eastern hall block is divided into five bays. The large windows of the three inner bays are set in shallow round brick arches, arched on the second floor and square-headed on the ground and first floors. The two outer bays are blind recesses but have decorative brick corbelling to the attic, which has five small square windows.

The open-air classrooms are located to the rear of the building and face south to get maximum natural light. They have metal balconies to the first and second floors, and the ground floor opens onto the playground to the south of the school overlooking the canal. Originally there were six classrooms on each level, with an extra ground floor classroom in place of a workshop. The ground floor was for infants, the first floor for junior boys and the second floor for junior girls. Each of the upper storey classrooms originally had three pairs of adjacent French windows with a six-pane window either side and four-pane, centrally-pivoted windows above. The ground floor classrooms had a slightly narrower frontage and only two pairs of French windows divided by a standard six-pane window. These are all uPVC replacements which retain the style and arrangement of the originals, although with top-hinged upper windows. The remainder of the fenestration on the south elevation comprises square-headed windows with dressings of alternating blue and red bricks.

The east and west elevations are similar with regular fenestration, mostly square headed. The ground floor of the west elevation has French windows. The rooftop playground is virtually unaltered with its red-tiled stair buildings and shelters with wooden trusses supported on cast-iron columns.

To the rear of the hall block is a modern small, single-storey, flat-roofed extension with a glazed entrance lobby. This is not of special interest.

Original features of note inside the building include parquet floors to halls and corridors, blue, cream and orange dado tiling (overpainted in places), internal glazing and glazed doors to classrooms. The stairs retain their plain metal banisters with wooden handrails. On the stairs on the first floor are two wooden memorial boards, known as LCC Brave Deeds Boards, recording the names of pupils who had rescued people from drowning in the Regent's Canal.

The original cast-iron railings, panelled brick boundary wall and gate piers to the front elevation remain. The section of boundary wall to the east of the eastern end of the railings is not of special interest. The original metal railings to the rooftop playground also survive. The eastern playground has high stock brick retaining walls to Noel Street and there is also a boundary wall on the canal side of the site supported on retaining walls above the towpath. These are not of special interest.

Originally named Hanover Street Board School, after the previous name of Noel Road, the school was originally opened in 1877 with places for 828 boys, girls and infants, rising to 1,229 by 1893. It was a typical three-storey London Board school built on a restricted site south of Hanover Street at its junction with St Peter's Street, adjacent to the Regent's Canal and just east of City Road Lock. The present school was built in 1931-2 by the London County Council slightly to the west of the Board school, which was demolished due to subsidence resulting from its location next to the canal. The creation of the new school, designed by the LCC Architects Department, involved the demolition not only of the original school but twelve houses in the terrace to the west to give an enlarged site. Despite this extra space it was still a relatively restricted site and the new school followed the earlier Board school in being multi-storey, as was usually the case where the LCC replaced existing Board schools, despite the prevailing trend for single-storey primary schools where space allowed. Most of the original site of the school was used to create a large playground to the east of the new school which was, nonetheless, larger than the original school and allowed for lower-density classrooms.

The new school reflected current thinking regarding school design in its single-banked classrooms which opened out onto balconies overlooking the canal through French windows, allowing maximum ventilation and light. Fresh air and good lighting had been a major preoccupation with health practitioners, educationalists and, eventually, schools architects such as George Widdows in Derbyshire, George Reid in Staffordshire, RG Kirkby in Bradford and WH Webb in London, since the early 1900s. This movement of hygiene-led schools design reached its culmination in the separate-block planned, open-air special schools which began to be built in the years prior to World War I and reached their heyday in the 1920s. Hanover School is a successful attempt to merge the Board school triple-decker approach to schools design with the then current health and hygiene driven approach of the open-air schools.