Susan Lawrence and Elizabeth Lansbury Schools

Primary school and adjoining nursery school on Cordella Street in Poplar, built between 1949 and 1952. The Susan Lawrence School was constructed first (1949–1951) and the Elizabeth Lansbury Nursery School followed (1951–1952). Both were designed by the architectural practice Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall for the London County Council, with F R S Yorke as job architect, assisted by K W Grieb and J Sofaer respectively.

The buildings employ the Hills' 8'3" prefabricated steel frame system, which had been developed in collaboration with Hertfordshire County Council for its pioneering post-war schools programme. This modular system determined both the floor plan layout and the proportions of the elevations. The frame is clad in concrete panels, brick and stone. The assembly hall and nursery ranges have copper roofs, while the remaining structures are covered with flat felted roofs.

The primary school is arranged as a two-storey central classroom spine. The ground floor contains the infants' classrooms with a covered play area, cloakrooms (one later converted to house a swimming tank), and five classrooms served by a spinal corridor lit by small glazed toplights. The upper floor accommodates the junior school with eight classrooms arranged in pairs, reached via glazed links from a corridor positioned over the cloakrooms. An entrance hall connects to a ground floor kitchen and dining hall through a cross passage, with an adjacent staircase. At the eastern end sit the original entrance hall and a pair of assembly halls set one above the other, faced in brick and Hornton stone with a copper roof. A projecting block of staff rooms and offices towards Cordella Street creates a formal entrance corner. To the west are a brick kitchen yard and boiler house with chimney.

The Elizabeth Lansbury Nursery School is a single-storey structure in an L-shaped plan, containing two playrooms. It was extended in the early 1970s by the Greater London Council Architect's Department in identical style. The nursery employs precast concrete floors throughout and wood wool ceilings, with exposed steel trusses visible in the larger spaces.

The elevations feature extruded aluminium windows with opening casements in wooden frames, positioned to respect the 8'3" grid and set behind deep eaves. The assembly range is similarly fenestrated on its sides, with Hornton stone infill panels between and brick ends. The main entrance displays five bays of full-height glazing with mullions and transoms forming a square pattern. The nursery range features decorative fascias and blinds, with full-height glazing in two or three tiers (the latter for playrooms), swivel-opening toplights and sliding casements below, all set beneath deep timber eaves.

The interiors include open well staircases with slender steel balustrades characteristic of the Festival of Britain idiom. Distinctive tilework panels by artist Peggy Angus are incorporated in the original entrance hall, dining hall and nursery playrooms, forming an integral and admired element of the composition.

A stock brick wall bounds the playground along Kerby and Ricardo Streets, adjoining the assembly hall to the north. On Ricardo Street, the architect deliberately adopted a curved or "crinkle crankle" form to skirt and preserve mature trees that once stood there.

The schools replaced the Ricardo Street Schools of 1913–1914, which were bombed in 1940 and 1944. The Susan Lawrence School was the first building to be reconstructed as part of the "Live Architecture" exhibition of the Festival of Britain, for which the Lansbury area was selected in 1949. The Stepney and Poplar area had been identified in 1943 as particularly requiring urgent post-war reconstruction, and the County of London Plan devised by J H Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie designated eleven neighbourhoods for regeneration. The exhibition site was chosen both for its correspondence to the catchment area of an infant school and for its proximity to river transport.

The Festival of Britain (May–September 1951) celebrated United Kingdom arts, industry and technology, marking the centenary of the Great Exhibition and promoting national pride during post-war recovery. The main site on London's South Bank attracted some 8.5 million visitors and included the Royal Festival Hall and various pavilions, cafés and sculptures, alongside the Festival Gardens in Battersea Park. The "Live Architecture" Exhibition, co-ordinated by Frederick Gibberd, illustrated reconstruction and neighbourhood planning through the new Lansbury estate, which comprised diverse housing and building types including these schools, Crisp Street Market Clock Tower, Festival Inn, the Church of St Mary and St Joseph, and Trinity Methodist Church.

Susan Lawrence (1871–1947) was a Poplar Alderman, London County Council councillor and Member of Parliament for East Ham, described as a "zealot in the cause of education" and the only woman to represent both the Conservative (Municipal Reform) and Labour parties on the LCC. Elizabeth Lansbury was the wife of George Lansbury (1859–1940), twice mayor of Poplar, its MP from 1922 to 1940, and leader of the Labour Party from 1931 to 1935. The Lansbury exhibition site was the first large-scale reconstruction scheme for the East End and served as a model for subsequent developments, particularly in the New Towns. Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall subsequently designed numerous schools, but this, their second, remains among their most adventurous works. It was their first to incorporate tiles by Peggy Angus, a distinctive feature subsequently repeated throughout their later practice. The Elizabeth Lansbury School was the first post-war nursery school in London, and possibly nationally.

At the time, the Susan Lawrence School was the most admired building in the Lansbury Exhibition. Building magazine wrote in July 1951 that it "seems to have passed its searching test with dazzling success", regarding it as a significant refinement of ideas only tentatively explored at Barclay School, and praised its "urbanity" and "elegant unity of planning" as "something new in London's East End". The Architectural Review commended the tilework as a durable, colourful finish and noted the school as an unusually architectural expression of contemporary interest in child-scaled, practical spaces. Ian Nairn considered it one of the best buildings of the exhibitions and "one of the best things the firm has done, large-scaled and relaxed" in his 1964 work Modern Buildings in London.

The building demonstrates the Hertfordshire prefabricated system adapted and refined by the private architectural practice, and holds special significance for its association with the Festival of Britain "live" architecture exhibition. It forms a strong architectural group with Frederick Gibberd's adjacent shopping precinct.