Former Bromley Hall School for the Physically Handicapped

Former Bromley Hall School for the Physically Handicapped

This single-storey school was built on a 1.25-acre inner-city site that formerly housed a late 19th-century board school. The site was surrounded by slum housing and waste ground, with the Blackwall Tunnel approach road under construction immediately to the west. This constrained location led to an inward-looking cellular plan with classroom pavilions alternating with enclosed courtyards, encircled by a continuous boundary wall. The arrangement was influenced by Arne Jacobsen's Munkegård School in Copenhagen, completed in 1957. All buildings maintain a single level with no changes in height.

The main walls, including the boundary wall, are constructed of brown engineering brick, a material left exposed throughout the interior apparently to resist damage by wheelchairs. Roof structures are of laminated timber, faced internally with plasterboard and externally with artificial slates. Windows and rooflights are set in wood frames. Floors are of linoleum, with a wood-block floor in the assembly hall.

To the west is an enclosed forecourt where children were dropped off and collected by bus. The main central doorway, which originally led directly to the dining hall and was flanked by the kitchen, headteacher's office and wheelchair store, became disused early on and is now blocked up. Smaller doorways on either side provide access to twin circulation corridors punctuated by blocks of toilets, changing rooms and stores. Separate circulation was provided for younger and older children, with junior classrooms on the southern corridor and senior classrooms (along with a caretaker's flat) to the north. Each classroom has access to its own small paved courtyard, effectively forming a double unit where children could engage in various indoor and outdoor activities under a single teacher's supervision. The nursery and hydrotherapy blocks are located at the ends of the corridors as later additions. The eastern return corridor leads to three specialist classrooms, originally for woodwork, housecraft and typewriting, which overlook a small enclosed garden planted with silver birch trees beyond which lies the main play area. The dining hall, assembly hall, library and medical unit occupy the central core. The library opens onto a further courtyard used as the infants' playground and doubling as a rest area for children with heart conditions.

The site boundary is a seven-foot-high curved wall with rounded corners at entrances. Twin vehicle entrances with double metal gates lead from Bromley Hall Road into the forecourt, around which are several capsule-shaped utility enclosures. The various classrooms and communal areas are treated as linked pavilions, each with its own tall hipped roof rising to a canted rooflight. This feature was presumably inspired by nearby industrial buildings such as the early 19th-century drying kilns at Clock Mill on the River Lea, though it also recalls Erich Mendelsohn's Hermann Hat Factory in Luckenwalde, Germany, built in 1920. The main hall has a taller roof with a pyramidal glazed top. A square boiler stack at the south-west corner provides further vertical emphasis. The 1970s additions to the east are treated similarly to the earlier phase but feature monopitch roofs.

Each square classroom space is lit from three sides: from the front via full-height windows and doors opening into its corresponding courtyard, from the courtyard behind via a glazed strip set under the eaves, and from above through the roof aperture whose light is distributed evenly by a white-painted pyramidal ceiling. Radiators are set within low tiled benches at the front of each room. Some classrooms have built-in timber workbenches to the rear. Toilet, changing and storage blocks are arranged along the inside of the access corridors, dividing them into alternating deeper and shallower spaces, the latter treated as glazed links cutting across the courtyards and containing further radiators set into benches. Internal doors contain glazed circular or rectangular apertures set low down to prevent collisions between children approaching from either side. To the east, the corridors lead to the nursery and hydrotherapy units, the latter having a sunken central pool and changing area.

The assembly hall is a large square space with a central skylight supplemented by clerestorey lights set lower down in the roof slopes. It doubled as a gymnasium with direct access to changing rooms north and south. To the east is the former library, from which folding glazed doors (now sealed shut) once opened into the paved central courtyard. A second courtyard further east has been roofed over to form a shower block. Folding doors to the west of the hall open into the dining room, a top-lit rectangular space which also incorporates the former entrance lobby.