Eveline Lowe School

Eveline Lowe School is a primary and nursery school on Marlborough Grove, designed from 1963 onwards and built in 1966 by the Development Group of the Department of Education and Science in conjunction with the Inner London Education Authority. The design team was led by David and Mary Medd, working with education experts.

The building is constructed of brick with a partial steel frame on pile foundations (required due to exceptionally difficult soil conditions). It features large plate glass timber windows providing views suitable for the smallest children, with panel infill below and ventilating louvres. The original timber eaves cornice has been replaced with late-20th-century plastic. Pitched tiled roofs overhang in a series of covered verandas extending to each pair of classrooms. A four-inch module was adopted throughout the design. The building is single storey, though higher in the main hall, which is lit by concealed clerestorey glazing. This single-storey approach was deliberately chosen because local children mainly lived in neighbouring high-rise flats.

The plan is organic, centred around two main courtyards: one serving the main school and organised around the main hall, the other separating the nursery and youngest infants' rooms. The deep plan encouraged the use of pitched roofs, initially adopted as an economy measure, and the building reads as a series of linked pavilions. Despite deceptively simple exteriors, the consistent use of brick and timber forms a coherent idiom. The principal courtyard features a central brick structure incorporating a raised pond, and a paling fence to the front reinforces the line of the timber eaves.

Internally, there were originally eight paired 'teaching centres' (classroom units). The two at the south end serve nursery groups and remain the only part of the building where two classes collaborate as an integrated team with mixed age groups, being partially detached from the rest of the school save by a covered area. Four central rooms serve infants, including one now used as a library, linked by a corridor dining area to staff offices, main hall and kitchen. To the north east are a classroom for older children, a staff crèche and a general purpose meeting room. Each group of classrooms originally had a quiet space: for young infants, a kiva (a square room with steps for children to sit around for reading, the term derived from Native American architecture), and for older children, originally with tables for quiet study, now serving as the staff room. The classrooms themselves function as general working areas, equipped with large sinks, cupboards, mobile bins, walk-in stores, bulletin boards and shelving. Each original pair of classrooms shares a veranda for messy, noisy or quiet table-top activities.

The interior features fine quality pine timber ceilings throughout most areas and fixed shelving and seating, particularly in the nursery dining area and hall/gymnasium. The hall/gymnasium has a Drifloor system of linoleum, cork, hardboard and sand—an innovation at the time. The kiva has carpeted raised floors surrounding a central well with timber wall fixtures. Washroom fixtures were developed from designs created by the Medds and others for Hertfordshire County Council in the late 1940s.

The school embodies educational philosophy-driven design developed from ideas that began in Hertfordshire schools in the late 1940s. Research by the DES Development Group showed that primary school children did not require conventional classrooms but rather a range of facilities for varied creative activities, both quiet and messy. By eliminating corridors entirely, the DES achieved greater variety of spaces within tight budgets. These concepts developed from the first open-plan schools for small rural communities designed by the then Ministry of Education at Finmere, Oxfordshire and Great Ponton, Lincolnshire in 1958, and promoted by the Ministry's Handbook on Primary Education in 1959. Whereas in the late 1950s teaching mixed age groups was conceived only for rural areas, by 1963 this was recognised as a means of encouraging active and creative learning in groups of varying sizes. These educational ideas were being explored by the Central Advisory Council's committee chaired by Lady Plowden during this period.

Despite conventional building materials, the school represents the culmination of ideas on space efficiency and new teaching methods begun in the 1940s. It was constructed within standard cost limits of the day, despite expensive foundations and difficult landscaping necessitated by soil conditions. The design was developed by the long-standing team of DES architects and educators working with the London County Council and its successor, the Inner London Education Authority. Its completion coincided with publication of the Plowden Report on primary education in 1967, marking a return to primary school consideration after years focused on secondary education. The school was ceremonially opened in February 1967 by Anthony Crosland, MP and Secretary of State for Education and Science, and was named after a local politician active in Southwark from the 1930s. Eveline Lowe proved widely influential, both in Great Britain and the United States.

Late-20th-century temporary structures on the site are not of special interest.