Columbia Market Nursery School

Nursery school, 1930, by the London County Council Architects' Department.

Columbia Market Nursery School is constructed with a timber frame, weatherboard cladding, and pitched tiled roofs. The building is planned around a courtyard, which was originally open to the east but was closed in the early 2000s with a range built in keeping with the older sections. A lightweight modern canopy covers part of the courtyard and runs along the northern elevation; these early 21st-century features lack special interest. The north and west ranges contain the classrooms; the south range contains the former medical inspection room, staff room, and headteacher's room. The plan survives well. Bathrooms are located at the south-west and north-west corners of the courtyard in their original positions, although the former has been extended. A kitchen and boiler room are located to the south-west of the courtyard.

The exterior shows neo-Georgian detailing with multi-pane timber casement windows, a canted bay window, and an entrance porch with turned vase balusters on the south range. The original open verandas that ran around the courtyard and provided access to each classroom were enclosed with glazed folding partitions above a solid balustrade in 1935; these modifications survive unaltered.

Internally, there were originally low solid wood partitions between the classrooms and the verandas. These partitions were high enough for children to see out over and to benefit from the fresh air and light prized by open-air school principles. They defined the classroom boundaries and had small gates for allowing children out at playtime. These partitions, though not the gates, survive with glazing above added at an unknown date, though the joinery suggests not long after the verandas were enclosed. All four classrooms survive in footprint (two on the west side with a partition wall removed to make one large classroom) and retain individual timber doors to the garden, exposed roof trusses with metal ties, and rooflights in the northern classrooms.

At the end of the First World War, elementary schooling became compulsory for all children and the school leaving age was raised to 14. A need for nursery places for younger children also emerged, as large numbers of women had undertaken work in factories during wartime, changing patterns of family life. Elementary school teachers and paediatricians noticed that health problems in children often set in before they arrived at infant school. Nursery education was hoped to ensure children were clean, nourished, and healthy in their early years, preventing serious illness later on.

The first nurseries were philanthropic in spirit, providing social and medical welfare for underprivileged children in working-class districts. The initiative came from the voluntary sector, with Margaret and Rachel McMillan pioneering an open-air nursery in Greenwich in 1914; the buildings dating to 1918-21 on that site are now listed Grade II, along with a memorial to Margaret from 1932. This was an exceptional school, cited in government reports as a model decades later; most early nurseries occupied ad hoc conversions of older buildings or comprised 'babies classes' in schools for older children. Even by 1939, half of the 87 official nursery schools nationally were voluntary foundations.

The 1918 Education Act permitted, but did not compel, Local Education Authorities to provide or fund nursery schools. The 1920s and early 1930s saw many authorities develop plans for nursery schools, some of which were realised, although others were abandoned following the economic crisis of 1931. By 1937, only 26 out of 316 Local Education Authorities (some eight percent) were directly managing nursery schools. Most of these 26 maintained only a single school, typically situated in the large industrial towns of the north and midlands. The pioneer Local Education Authorities were Bradford, which maintained eight schools by 1937, and London, which by 1939 had established five schools and grant-aided a further 18. The London County Council, in addition to financially assisting the McMillan school from 1919, planned in 1920 to establish six experimental nursery schools, three of which were to be self-contained. Economic constraints stalled the programme, and it was revived in altered form at the end of the decade. In 1928, the Council resolved to build two experimental detached nurseries of 150 places each on two Tower Hamlets sites in their possession: the result was Columbia Market Nursery School and Old Church Nursery School. Both schools were opened on the same day in August 1930. The choice of location was unsurprising; the poverty of the area meant that many East End mothers worked and infant health was poor. The first head-teacher of Columbia Market reckoned that of the 88 children on the opening roll, a third had rickets, a third had problematic tonsils or adenoids, and around 80 percent were inadequately nourished. The schools' experimental purpose meant it received many visitors, over 100 in a few months in spring 1931, including students from training colleges and educationalists from overseas.

Each school was planned with two large and two small classrooms; drying, lavatory, and bathing rooms; medical inspection room; kitchen, staff rooms, and stores. Staffing arrangements and hours of attendance were based on the practice of the Rachel McMillan School. The schools were single-storey with rooms around a central courtyard. Like Rachel McMillan School, both were originally planned according to open-air principles, with the courtyard-facing classroom elevations unenclosed and open-sided, leading onto a veranda. By December 1930, however, just months after opening, the head-teacher reported that the verandas were very slippery in wet weather and that mothers were keeping their children at home on very cold days. From January 1931, canvas curtains were installed along the verandas to prevent draughts. In October 1932, a glass windscreen was added to the western range, which suffered the north wind. In the summer holidays of 1935, the stick balustrade to the veranda was replaced in solid wood and the upper portions fitted with glazed screens that could be folded back in clement weather.

The school remains a thriving nursery school today, an additional range modelled on the original building having been added in 2000, closing in the originally open east side of the courtyard.