Essendine School and associated school keeper's house, special school, handicraft block and boundary wall and gates

Essendine School and Associated Buildings

Essendine School is a board school designed by T.J. Bailey for the School Board for London in 1899-1900 and completed under the London County Council in 1904.

Architecture and Exterior

The school presents a symmetrical, rectangular composition executed in a lavishly decorated Baroque Revival style. The building rises three storeys with an additional attic storey over the central hall block. Construction employs yellow stock brick with a blue brick plinth, rusticated red brick at ground floor level, and red brick with terracotta and stone dressings above. The roofs are both tiled and slated, with brick chimneys. Original timber sash windows survive throughout.

The principal elevation along Essendine Road (east side) extends to 28 window bays arranged in a long, complex symmetrical composition with projecting wings and lower, recessed linking blocks. The central block, housing the halls, features four round-arched ground floor windows with emphasised voussoirs. Above these, two storeys of windows are articulated by Ionic brick pilasters with cream terracotta bands and garlanded capitals, surmounted by a cornice leading to the raised fourth storey. This is topped by an ornamental parapet with a hipped tile roof, skylights, and a small louvred cupola with domed metal roof and weathervane. The remaining fenestration consists generally of tall windows arranged in groups of three: the lower two floors have flat-arched heads, while the upper floor has round-arched heads with the upper central window featuring a banded surround.

The rear (western) elevation mirrors the front but with a five-bay rather than four-bay central section and slightly simpler link blocks. The south end carries four decorated terracotta plaques bearing the date 'AD 1900', while the north end displays 'AD 1904'. North and south elevations are similar, both with mostly blind walling and a projecting full-height fenestrated entrance block containing two entrance doors. One entrance is reached by an external flight of stairs; that to the south has been lost to a flat-roofed, single-storey extension. Each of the long frontages also has two entrances positioned either side of the central blocks. All doors have stone surrounds with inscribed lintels designating boys, girls, and infants.

Interior

The interior follows the standard later London School Board plan with a central hall, a bank of classrooms down one side, and corridors leading to clusters of classrooms in the wings. This arrangement is readable on each of the three main storeys, which were originally designated for infants (ground floor), girls (first floor), and boys (second floor). Mezzanines between the floors overlook the corridors and formerly served as staff and head-teacher's rooms.

In the attic of the hall block are former drawing classrooms which retain their timber roof trusses, as does the second floor hall below. Hardwood block floors are laid throughout, with russet glazed brick dados (mostly now painted). Semi-circular glazed fanlights and internal windows feature in most corridors and classrooms, while the upper floor corridors have skylights.

Six stairwells serve the building, each with cream glazed brick walls, metal balustrades to the upper flights and hardwood handrails lower down, and camber-headed arches leading to the corridors from the intermediate landings. The cream glazed brick continues into the corridors, some now painted over. Wooden classroom partitions survive on the upper floor corridor. Several classroom fireplaces remain, as do some in the former staffrooms with tiled 1930s surrounds. An original dumb-waiter is still in situ, as are some of the gas-lights on the stairwells.

Subsidiary Buildings

The schoolkeeper's house stands to the south of the school building. It is two storeys of yellow stock brick with red brick dressings and a pitched slate roof with dormers projecting through the eaves on the principal elevation facing the school. A tall projecting entrance has a four-pane light over the door, and the windows are sashes.

The special school is a large two-storey block with hipped slate roof positioned parallel to the west elevation of the school, later extended to the north. It originally housed a special school with cookery and laundry facilities above. The building is of yellow stock brick with red brick dressings to regular square-headed fenestration on the main elevation, broken by an off-centre, round-arched, full-height entrance arch.

The handicraft block stands to the north of the special school. This two-storey building has a gabled slate roof and an arched open-air playground space on the ground floor, glazed-in with uPVC in 2007 when the upper floor windows were replaced with the same material. The interiors of these three buildings were not inspected.

Boundary Wall and Gates

The boundary wall is of yellow stock brick with stone-capped red brick piers. It is broken to reveal the frontage of the central hall block on Essendine Road, with the gap closed by iron railings. Three original gates with inscribed stone lintels survive onto Essendine Road, one of which serves the schoolkeeper's house.

Historical Context

Essendine School was originally called Essendine Road School after the street along its eastern boundary. Designed by T.J. Bailey in 1899-1900 and extended to the north in 1904 under the London County Council, it was a large school with provision for a total of 1,556 pupils.

The pioneering Elementary Education Act of 1870, steered through Parliament by William Forster and known as 'Forster's Act', was the first to establish a national, secular, non-charitable provision for the education of children aged 5 to 13. A driving force behind the new legislation was the need for a literate and numerate workforce to ensure Britain remained at the forefront of manufacture and commerce. Moreover, the extension of the franchise to the urban working classes in the 1867 Reform Act alerted politicians to the need to, in words attributed to the then Chancellor, 'educate our masters'.

The Act required partially state-funded elementary schools to be established in areas where existing provision was inadequate, to be managed by elected school boards. The School Board of London was the first to be founded in 1870 and the most influential. It was one of the first truly democratic elected bodies in Britain, with both women and members of the working classes on the board. It comprised 49 members under the chairmanship of the former Viceroy of India, Lord Lawrence, and included five members of parliament, eleven clergymen, the scientist Thomas Huxley, suffragists Emily Davies (an educationalist) and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (a doctor), and a working-class cabinetmaker, Benjamin Lucraft. The Board's politics were ambitious and progressive, as epitomised by its passing of a by-law in 1871 compelling parents to send children to school; this was not compulsory nationally until 1880.

Such was the achievement of the London School Board in the last quarter of the 19th century that by the Edwardian period few neighbourhoods in London were without a red brick, Queen Anne style, three-storey school designed by E.R. Robson, the Board's architect, or his successor T.J. Bailey. The Board's adoption of the newly-fashionable Queen Anne style was a significant departure from the Gothic Revival deemed appropriate to educational buildings up until that point, and created a distinctive and highly influential board school aesthetic. Around 500 board schools were built in London, many in densely-populated, poor areas where they were (and often remain) the most striking buildings in their locales.

The Board did not escape criticism, however, both on the grounds of expense to rate-payers and for potentially radicalising the urban poor through secular education. Yet its supporters were unapologetic, as the words of Charles Booth, justifying the expense of more elaborate schools in the East End, indicate: 'It was necessary to strike the eye and hold the imagination. It was worth much to carry high the flag of education, and this is what has been done. Each school stands up from its playground like a church in God's acre, ringing its bell'. Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Naval Treaty' (1894) also lauded the new metropolitan landmarks as 'Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future', thus epitomising the reformers' confidence in the power of universal education to transform society. The striking design of many of these schools is illustrative of this special history.

The building is designated Grade II as a grand, symmetrical London Board School of 1899-1904 designed by T.J. Bailey in an unusual Baroque Revival style, of which this is one of only two identified examples, indicative of the move away from the established Queen Anne style towards a more Classical style. The principal elevations are skilfully designed to provide variety to the long frontages and are richly detailed with terracotta, stone, and high quality brick dressings; the exterior is virtually unaltered from when it was built. The school has a well-surviving interior with cream glazed brick in the stairwells and corridors. The school, caretaker's house, special school, handicraft block, and boundary walls form a characterful ensemble of late-Victorian and Edwardian educational buildings.