Marion Richardson Primary School

Marion Richardson Primary School

A school built in 1907 by architect TJ Bailey for the London County Council, located in Stepney. The building is designed in Edwardian Baroque style and represents one of the larger East End board schools from the ambitious school building programme of the School Board for London and its successor, the London County Council.

The exterior is characterised by red brick elevations with stone dressings, copings and pediments, brick and stone chimneys, and pitched tile roofs curbed by parapets. The turrets on the west front are topped with copper domes. The fenestration comprises white-painted wooden windows, some original and some sensitive replacements, arranged regularly across the façades.

The west front displays three storeys of halls with a pitched roof at the centre, flanked by square towers with circular turrets and by links with pilasters rising to segment-headed gables, ending in plainer wings with stone quoins at the corners. A low addition of approximately 1970 projects to the right of the centre. The east front facing Head Street is arranged with windows in groups of three and has slightly projecting bays to the left and right of the centre, each with stone pediments carrying the initials LCC and banded quoins. The short north and south fronts have pairs of pediments at roof level bearing the date 1907 and further banded quoins; the north front facing Senrab Street features a cartouche reading LCC / 1907. Three of the original entrances with their inscribed lintels, steps and iron railings survive. The circa 1970 block, not of special interest, resulted in the removal of one girls and infants entrance.

The interior follows a standard plan with a central hall, a bank of classrooms down one side, and corridors leading to clusters of classrooms in the wings, readable across each of the three storeys. Mezzanines between the floors overlook the corridors and were formerly staff and head-teacher's rooms. The attic contains former drawing classrooms and science rooms which retain their timber roof trusses, although partly concealed by a later suspended ceiling. Hardwood block floors, glazed brick dados mostly painted, and semi-circular glazed fanlights and internal windows feature in most corridors and classrooms. The upper floor corridors have skylights. Four stairwells each have russet glazed brick walls, metal balustrades to the upper flights and hardwood handrails lower down; the glazed brick in all but the upper sections of one stairwell has been painted over. A single fireplace survives in one of the former staffrooms.

Originally called Senrab Street School, the building served the area's predominantly Jewish population, including the children of dock workers and those employed in the rag trade. The school originally accommodated 856 children: 308 infants on the ground floor, 274 girls on the first floor, and 274 boys on the top floor.

TJ Bailey had been architect to the School Board for London before its dissolution in 1902, when responsibility for London's education passed to the London County Council. During the final quarter of the 19th century, the London School Board achieved considerable success, resulting in few London neighbourhoods being without a red brick, Queen Anne style, three-storey school designed by Bailey or his predecessor ER Robson. Under the LCC, schools continued to be built in a similar style and materials until around 1910.

The school represents the legacy of the Elementary Education Act of 1870, known as Forster's Act, which was the first legislation to establish a national, secular, non-charitable provision for educating children aged 5 to 13. The Act was driven by the need for a literate and numerate workforce to maintain Britain's commercial and manufacturing dominance, and by politicians' recognition following the 1867 Reform Act of the need to educate the newly enfranchised urban working classes. The Act required partially state-funded elementary schools to be established in areas with inadequate provision, managed by elected school boards. Around 500 board schools were built in London, many in densely populated poor areas where they became the most striking buildings in their localities. The School Board did not escape criticism on grounds of expense to rate-payers and concerns about the effects of secular education, leading to its being taken over by the LCC in 1902. Nevertheless, supporters of the new schools remained confident in their mission. Charles Booth justified the expense of elaborate schools in the East End by noting that the schools needed to "strike the eye and hold the imagination" and "carry high the flag of education", with each school standing "up from its playground like a church in God's acre, ringing its bell". The striking design of many of these schools reflects this conviction in the transformative power of universal education.