Gainsborough School Including Caretaker'S House, Outdoor Wcs And Covered Play Areas, Handicraft Block And Special School

This is a board school designed by Thomas James Bailey for the School Board for London in 1899, completed in stages up until 1918. It has undergone later alterations.

Main School Building

Gainsborough School is a three-storey building constructed of stock brick with stone dressings and copings. The windows are timber sashes, though these are modern replacements of the originals. The roofs are pitched and hipped, covered in tiles and slate, again modern replacements but in sympathetic materials.

The principal elevation faces south and consists of a central hall range of five bays, flanked by stair towers topped with pyramidal roofs, lead caps and cupolas. Beyond these are link blocks of four bays each, terminating in end blocks with shaped Dutch gables featuring stone coping. This frontage displays characterful details including baroque stone panels beneath the windows in the link blocks bearing the construction dates, volute-shaped kneelers, stone oculi in the gables, and rubbed brick aprons beneath some windows.

The north elevation is less varied, with the same gabled end blocks but a single central range twelve bays wide. It relies on the sheer scale of fenestration for architectural effect. The east and west elevations are plainly fenestrated in the same pattern as the principal elevations: flat-arched windows on the lower floors and segmental-arched windows on the top floor. Separate entrances for infants, girls and boys survive, some with inscribed lintels.

Ancillary Buildings

The school forms part of an ensemble of associated buildings on the site.

The caretaker's house stands at the south-west corner of the playground, occupying the upper floors of a building that originally housed the cookery classroom on the ground floor and the laundry above. The glazed brick stairwell leading from ground to first floor survives, as do large open rooms on both floors. This building bears the school's only plaque, wrapping around its street-facing corner and reading 'S B for L' and 'Berkshire Road Schools 1899'.

Original outdoor WCs line the southern boundary of the playground. There are also covered play areas or bike sheds, all original. A second covered play area stands to the north of the site alongside a single-storey former handicraft block.

Facing Berkshire Road is a smaller, single-storey school building, originally a special school for children whose mental or physical health required particular care. This brick building comprises two parallel ranges with rendered gabled ends and a link corridor between them. The side elevation windows break through the parapet into gabled dormers rendered in roughcast. The roof is slate and other windows have red rubbed brick flat arches. Inside, the timber rafters and metal tie-beams of the original roofs survive, but the building has been refurbished very recently and most features and finishes are modern. A light-weight timber canopy wraps around the north and west sides of the building, providing covered outdoor space. This has necessitated the bricking-in of one of the end gable windows.

Interior of Main Building

The plan survives well, with classrooms leading off a central hall on all three floors, which were originally for infants on the ground floor, girls on the first floor and boys on the second floor. There are four stairwells, those to the south also serving the attic storey, lined with russet glazed bricks that have been painted over. Glazed bricks also appear to line corridors and the halls to dado height, but these too have been painted over.

A good number of original features and fittings survive including parquet flooring in the hall, glazed partitions between classrooms, internal windows between the hall and classrooms and the mechanisms for opening them, timber lanterns above the link corridors on the third floor, niches with flues which once housed cast-iron stoves, and some doors and radiators. The small offices housed in mezzanines above the main corridors were originally teachers' staff rooms and the headteacher's rooms. The attic art classroom has the original wooden open truss roof.

Historical Context

Gainsborough School was originally called Berkshire Road Schools, after the street running along its western boundary (the plural denoting the school was for boys, girls and infants). When complete, it served around 1,000 children.

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 to 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.

The School Board of London was the first to be founded in 1870, and the most influential. The Board 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 Edward Robert Robson, the Board's architect, or his successor Thomas James 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 listed for being one of the grandest board schools in East London which flamboyantly fulfilled Charles Booth's ambition to plant the flag of education in the late-19th-century capital's poorer neighbourhoods. The dramatic roof-scape of cupolas and gables and the almost palatial scale of the school makes an impact from some distance away. It retains good quality materials and detailing and a reasonably well-preserved interior. The school and its surrounding ancillary buildings form a characterful ensemble of late-Victorian and Edwardian educational buildings.