Battle Primary School Including Caretaker'S House, Former Cookery School, Manual Instruction Block And Boundary Railings And Gates

Battle Primary School is a board school designed by architect Spencer Slingsby Stallwood and built between 1891 and 1893, with a manual instruction block added around 1897. It is constructed of red brick with a clay tile roof.

The school comprises two principal buildings: the former infant school to the south and the larger upper school to the north. These were originally separate buildings but are now connected by a modern glazed entrance block. The infant school has a main hall surrounded on three sides by classrooms which open directly into it. The upper school follows an H-shaped plan, with the main hall positioned between two classroom ranges to the east and west that are accessed by corridors, plus additional classrooms to the north and south.

The buildings are designed in the Queen Anne Revival style, featuring extensive moulded brickwork, shaped gables and dormers, tall ridged and corbelled chimney stacks, and multi-pane sash and casement windows of painted timber, though many have now been replaced with modern double-glazed units. The two schools present a unified east elevation facing Cranbury Road. Each school has a pair of tall stepped and shaped gables in the centre bays, flanked by recessed outer bays with lower pedimented gables and dormers. The dormers have finely-moulded brick dentil courses. The northern return elevation displays a carved brick plaque bearing the date 1903, next to a raised pedimented doorway reached by steps with ornamental railings. Behind this is a half-octagonal projecting block that overlooks the rear playground. The upper school's west elevation facing Kensington Road has three tall scrolled and shaped half dormers flanked by recessed wings with triangular gables. At the rear of the upper school stands a tall square chimney that served as both exhaust and intake for a plenum (forced-air) ventilation system. This chimney has three pilastered stages and an octagonal louvered belfry-like top with a pyramidal roof.

Inside, the infant school hall has an open timber roof with arch-braced trusses reinforced by iron ties and resting on scrolled stone corbels. There is a timber boarded dado below with ornamental ventilation grilles, and the floor is wood-block. The infant school classrooms have arch-braced roofs, though most are now concealed by suspended ceilings, and many retain their ventilation grilles and fireplaces with simple scrolled surrounds. The upper school hall has a roof with polygonal timber trusses braced by a lattice of iron rods, and is lit by a continuous dormer strip or clerestory above eaves level. Large square apertures, now blocked, once opened into classrooms to the north and south. The classrooms in the east and west ranges have an unusual tripartite roof structure, with three curved principals meeting above the centre of the room. The head teacher's office in the east range attic space has a fireplace with a moulded timber surround.

The site includes several subsidiary features: at the south-west corner stands a two-storey caretaker's house with a gabled roof, projecting bay window and ridged and corbelled end stack. Adjoining this is a single-storey former cookery school with a tall pedimented half-dormer. To the north of the upper school is the manual instruction block of around 1897, which is much plainer in style, with half-dormers lighting the first-floor classroom and iron columns forming an open loggia below. The east and west boundaries of the site have ornamental iron railings and gates on a low brick plinth wall.

Battle belongs to the second generation of schools built by the Reading School Board. In 1889, a parcel of land was acquired amid the rapidly expanding network of terraced streets to the south of Oxford Road. The architect Spencer Slingsby Stallwood, who earlier that year had won the limited competition to build Redlands school, was commissioned to build a pair of schools: one for 200 infants and another for 400 older children. However, it was decided that so small a school would be uneconomic to build, and in 1891 Stallwood presented fresh plans for a much larger complex comprising an infant school for 300 pupils and a mixed upper school for 700, with a further block incorporating a cookery school and caretaker's cottage. Construction, carried out by Higgs & Son of Reading, was completed in 1893. The manual instruction block was added around 1897. During the First World War, the school was used as a military hospital. In the late 20th century, a link block was built joining the two main buildings.

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 five to thirteen. 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 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 later brought in. 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.

Spencer Slingsby Stallwood (1844-1922) was born in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where he trained with the borough and county surveyor Charles Carter, later working for architects' firms in Salisbury, Scarborough and Folkestone. He set up in independent practice in the latter town, where he restored St Peter's Church and built the adjoining parish school. Having been made Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1872, he returned to the Thames valley in 1875 and entered into partnership with the prominent Reading architect Joseph Morris. Morris and Stallwood were jointly responsible for Oxford Road School (1880-3) and for additions to a number of other Reading board schools. The partnership ended in 1885, but Stallwood went on to design three more schools for the Reading board—Redlands (1889-92), Battle (1892-3) and Wokingham Road (now Alfred Sutton, 1901-5)—as well as buildings for the University College and the double parade of shops and offices at Queen Victoria Street (1901).