The Henry Building At Katesgrove Primary School Including Boundary Wall And Former Caretaker'S Cottage

The Henry Building at Katesgrove Primary School is a board school built in 1873 to designs by the borough architect Joseph Morris, with extensions added in 1891 and 1902. It is constructed of red brick with blue-brick banding and diaper patterns, and has a tiled roof.

The school was originally built on a T-plan. The single-storey infant school to the north and the two-storey girls' and boys' range at right angles to the south still largely survive, though with later additions and some subdivision and amalgamation of spaces. The infant school was built around a large open hall or schoolroom, with the original gallery now removed. A smaller schoolroom for advanced infants lies to the south (now a meeting room), and a babies' room projects to the west (now staff toilets). This babies' room is now flanked to the right by a two-storey wing added in 1891, which has an entrance lobby below and staffroom above, and to the left by a later nursery block. A range of three classrooms to the east of the hall was added in 1902. The two-storey cross-range to the south has former girls' and boys' schoolrooms on the ground and first floors (now the library), each with three classrooms to the south, the latter extended in 1891.

The building is designed in a proto-Arts and Crafts Gothic style with extensive use of polychrome and moulded brickwork. Multi-pane mullion-and-transom windows of painted timber—many now replaced with modern double-glazed units—are set in pointed relieving arches with projecting hood-moulds and patterned or tiled tympana. The elevation facing Katesgrove Lane is strongly asymmetrical, with the various elements expressed as a series of gabled projections of differing heights, with steeply-pitched roofs and tall corbelled stacks. The 1891 wing is similarly detailed but in slightly lighter brick. A polygonal office (now a resources room) to the right and a nursery block to the left were probably added in 1902. The two-storey south elevation to the playground has two tall gabled projections, that to the right extended outward in 1891. The east (rear) elevation is partly obscured by the sloping site; there are two two-storey gabled wings to the left, and a single-storey four-gabled classroom range of plain red brick to the right added in 1902. A covered timber bridge on tall iron columns links the first floor to the raised playground. This is shown on the 1879 Ordnance Survey map, but was largely renewed in 2006.

Inside, the former infant schoolroom has an open scissor-truss roof of five bays with hammer-beams and cusped arch braces. The trusses rest on moulded stone corbels, and at cornice level is a double band of dog-tooth moulding. A stone fireplace with Gothic details, now blocked, stands in the centre of the east wall. The doors to the classrooms are part-glazed with multi-pane overlights. Most classrooms have open timber roofs concealed by suspended ceilings. Some have dog-tooth cornice details and simple brick fireplaces, all now blocked.

The building includes a brick boundary wall with a Gothic-arched entrance gateway to Katesgrove Lane. To the north of the main building stands a former caretaker's cottage of 1878, which was extended in 1897-9 to form laundry and housewifery classrooms.

Before the establishment of the Reading School Board, the industrial suburb of Katesgrove was served by a small charity school for 184 pupils run by Charlotte Pell. The area was identified early on as suffering a particular shortage of school places. The Board took over the existing school in 1872 and the following year commissioned the borough architect Joseph Morris to prepare designs for a much larger replacement for 678 pupils, on a sloping site formerly occupied by a villa known as Katesgrove House. Morris's school, built at the bottom of the slope, was designed to accommodate girls and infants on the ground floor and boys above, with the boys' playground placed at the top of an embankment and accessed via a timber bridge. Construction was undertaken by a group of contractors led by the local firm of Wheeler Bros. In 1878, in response to worsening vandalism outside school hours, Morris was employed to design a caretaker's cottage for the site; this was extended in 1897-9 to serve as a laundry and housewifery classroom.

In 1890-2 the new Central Boys' School was built at the top of the embankment to designs by William Ravenscroft by the builders Winter & Fitt of Reading. The Katesgrove boys' department was moved wholesale to the new school, and boys were also transferred from other schools in the borough. Meanwhile, in 1891, Morris was brought in again to extend and adapt the 1873 Katesgrove building to form a girls-only school. Further classrooms, again by Morris, were added in 1902. The site was used as a military hospital during the First World War. The boys' and girls' schools were finally merged in the 1960s; Morris's 1873 school is now known as the Henry Building, and the former Central Boys' School as the Dorothy Building.

The pioneering Elementary Education Act of 1870, steered through Parliament by William Forster and thus known as 'Forster's Act', was the first to establish a national, secular, non-charitable provision for the education of children aged 5-13. A driving force behind the new legislation was the need for a literate and numerate workforce to ensure that 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 also 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. At the beginning of 1871, Reading Borough Council petitioned the Government for the immediate establishment of a school board in the town, bypassing the usual preliminary inquiry. Elections were held in March 1871; the resulting nine-member board mainly comprised members of the town's social elite—three clergymen, two prominent industrialists, the headmaster of a local private school—but also included a local boot-maker, Jesse Herbert. The design of new schools was at first undertaken by the Berkshire county surveyor Joseph Morris, although other architects were brought in after 1890. The Board continued to oversee the building of new schools and the extension of existing premises until 1903, when responsibility for elementary education passed to the Borough Council.

Joseph Morris (1836-1913) was the leading architect in Reading during the later 19th century. Articled to the county surveyor John Berry Clancy, his first major independent work was the new church of St Paul at Highmoor, Oxfordshire in 1859. In Reading he was responsible for numerous offices, factories and houses, the latter ranging from large suburban villas to workers' terraces; he also restored and extended the town's two medieval churches of St Lawrence and St Mary. He was appointed Berkshire county surveyor in 1872, and it was probably in this capacity that he was selected to produce designs for the Reading School Board; his work included schools at Coley (1872), Katesgrove (1873), New Town (1874) and Oxford Road (1880-3), the latter together with SS Stallwood, his partner in the decade following 1875. From 1884 he became involved with the millenarian sect known as the Agapemonites, for whom he designed a large and ornate church in Clapton, north London (1893-6). Morris established an architectural dynasty in Reading that included two of his nephews and two of his children; his daughter Violet was one of the first women to join the profession.