Holbeach School Including School Keeper'S Cottage, Boundary Wall And Entrance Gates

Board school, 1900-1901 by TJ Bailey, extended 1905 and 1914, with minor later alterations.

Materials and Construction

The school is built of stock brick with a blue-brick plinth and dressings of red brick and buff terracotta. The roof is covered in red tiles and features a timber and lead cupola. The original timber sash windows have now been mostly replaced by double-glazed units with plastic frames.

Plan

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

Exterior

The west front facing Doggett Road has a central hall block with a crenellated parapet, its five bays divided by brick piers with terracotta volutes and finials. This is flanked by twin stair towers with finials and shaped gables, the southern tower having a timber belfry attached to its upper stage. Link blocks, that to the south having five lower storeys, connect to gabled outer wings.

The east front has similar outer wings, the left-hand gable bearing a plaque with the school's name and foundation date. Between these are stair towers—one to the south topped with a copper cupola, the other with a shaped gable—framing a classroom range with tall stepped half-dormers and a central pair of triangular gables with niche finials. Similar gables and dormers appear on the shorter north and south elevations. There are small single-storey extensions on the north and south facades.

Interiors

The interiors are of the standard board-school type, with exposed steel girders supporting the hall ceilings, and timber roof trusses in the second-floor and attic classrooms. The second-floor corridors are lit by skylights, 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 of which 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. The first-floor hall has been partitioned to form a library and computer room, and the screens separating the corridors from the halls and stairwells have recently received new fire-proof doors.

Subsidiary Features

At the corner of Doggett and Holbeach Roads stands the school keeper's cottage, built of stock brick with an apsidal red-brick stair turret surmounted by a tall copper finial. The curving open-newel stair survives inside, as does a fireplace with an ornamental timber surround.

The boundary wall is built of stock and red brick with wrought-iron entrance gates set in decorative stone architraves. The wall is abutted on the playground side by toilet blocks and playground sheds, but these have been much altered and now lack special interest.

History

Holbeach Road School was built in 1900-1901 by TJ Bailey, architect to the School Board for London. It was enlarged by the London County Council in 1904-1905, with Bailey again as the architect. The southern end wing was added in 1914, to the designs of the LCC architect WE Riley. Various alterations were made during the course of the 20th century, including small single-storey extensions on the west and south fronts and the remodelling of some of the internal spaces. In 2002-2003 the main roof and cupola were renewed, and the original external windows replaced with double-glazed units.

The pioneering Elementary Education Act of 1870, steered through Parliament by William Forster and thus 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 new legislation was the need for a literate and numerate workforce to ensure that 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 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, 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 on the board. 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, as 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 ER Robson, the Board's architect, or his successor TJ 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 however, both on the grounds of expense to rate-payers and for potentially radicalising the urban poor through secular education. Yet its supporters were unapologetic, as the words of Charles Booth, justifying the expense of more elaborate schools in the East End, indicate: '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.