Latitude: 51.4815 / 51°28'53"N
Longitude: -0.0228 / 0°1'21"W
OS Eastings: 537394
OS Northings: 177692
OS Grid: TQ373776
Mapcode National: GBR K6.BYL
Mapcode Global: VHGR7.K1B3
Plus Code: 9C3XFXJG+JV
Entry Name: Rachel Mcmillan Nursery
Listing Date: 26 June 2002
Grade: II
Source: Historic England
Source ID: 1360804
English Heritage Legacy ID: 489566
ID on this website: 101360804
Location: Deptford, Greenwich, London, SE8
County: London
District: Greenwich
Electoral Ward/Division: Greenwich West
Parish: Non Civil Parish
Built-Up Area: Greenwich
Traditional County: Kent
Lieutenancy Area (Ceremonial County): Greater London
Church of England Parish: Deptford St Nicholas and St Luke
Church of England Diocese: Southwark
Tagged with: Architectural structure
786/0/10150 MCMILLAN STREET
26-JUN-02 Rachel McMillan Nursery
GV II
Open-air nursery school. Opened 1914, surviving main range 1918, 1921, 1933, 1937-8, architects of last phase London County Council Architect's Department in succession to Edward Unwin who extended the offices in 1933. Stock brick, steep tiled roofs with short stacks to rear. Two classrooms, each self-contained with own toilet and washing facilities, with two-storey office range at end originally of 1918 and with later superintendent's flat over. Classrooms have glazed canopy on timber columns to shield their south facade, surviving substantially from . Large timber windows and doors to classrooms. Office entered under round-headed door with gauged brick head; meal windows to office, those to upper windows with horizontal panes. North elevation largely of unwindowed brick with short canopy to office range. Interiors have painted brick, timber doors, the individual classrooms with their own ablutions.
The Rachel McMillan Nursery School was until the war the only large school built specifically for nursery age children (under fives), and was internationally important. It was the achievement of two sisters, Rachel McMillan (1859-1917) and Margaret McMillan (1860-1931), and while it was been substantially rebuilt in the years immediately following Margaret's death it still demonstrates their beliefs in a healthy open-air regime and careful nurture as the best means of giving urban children a good start in life. While the other, always limited, built evidence of their lifelong campaign for child health and welfare in London and Bradford have gone or fail to demonstrate the qualities they stood for, the main part of the school from 1918-21 substantially survives as evidence of their work. Since Margaret believed in light-weight temporary shelters as the best form of school building, that something should survive is remarkable. The regime established by the school was for a nine-hour day, with the children having their morning wash and three meals at the school, an afternoon nap and a large amount of time spent in outdoor play and nature studies. An obituary of Margaret McMillan in The Labour Woman for May 1931 describes her as 'the most heroic figure in the world of education up to now' for her vision, oratory and persistent dedication to the cause of child health, and she was the English equivalent of Maria Montessori for her work with underprivileged urban children. The classrooms of 1921 were opened by Queen Mary, and in later life her patrons included Lord and Lady Astor, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay Macdonald; her earlier career was bound up by that of the Independent Labour Party, of which she was a founder member. This is the most significant nursery school of its date in England. The architect to the school in the 1930s was Edward Unwin, who died in 1936 but who was the son of Sir Raymond Unwin, the distinguished town planner, and who established brick, and large timber windows behind the earlier glazed canopies as the principal idiom of the school.
Sources
The Labour Woman, May 1931, p.68
Minutes of the Management Committee of Rachel McMillan School, 1929-39, held at London Metropolitan Archives
Commission on Nursery Buildings, 1933
D'Arcy Cresswell, Margaret McMillan, A Memoir, 1948
G A N Lowndes, Margaret McMillan, the Children's Champion, 1960
Margaret McMillan archives, Lewisham Local Studies Library
District Surveyors Returns for Greenwich, held at London Metropolitan Archives
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