Former Peterborough School Including School Keeper's Cottage (No. 60), Entrance Gates, Sheds and Wcs, Parsons Green and Walham, London

Description

FULHAM

333/0/10115 CLANCARTY ROAD
11-DEC-09 Former Peterborough School including s
chool keeper's cottage (no. 60), entra
nce gates, sheds and WCs

Also Known As: School Keeper's Cottage, 60, CLANCARTY ROAD
Board school, 1903-4 by TJ Bailey for the School Board for London. Later additions are not of special interest.

MATERIALS: Stock brick with blue-brick plinth and dressings of red brick and buff terracotta. Red tiled roof with timber and lead cupola. White-painted timber windows, mainly sashes.

PLAN: The school is of three storeys; each storey has a large south-facing hall in the central block bounded to the north by classrooms, and to east and west by corridors giving access to further classrooms, toilets and twin front and rear staircases. The attic space above the hall contains the former art room. The ground- and first-floor link blocks have mezzanines accessed by separate staircases. Beneath the central block is a boiler room and coal cellar.

EXTERIOR: The external treatment is in a Free Renaissance style, with much decorative use of red brick and terracotta. The south front to Clancarty Road has a central hall block with a crenellated parapet, its five bays divided by red-brick piers with terracotta volutes and niche finials. This is flanked by twin stair towers with finials and shaped gables, the eastern tower having a timber belfry attached to its upper stage. Link blocks of five lower storeys connect to gabled outer wings faced in red brick; the left-hand gable bears a terracotta plaque with the school's original name and foundation date. The north front has similar gabled outer wings, between which are tall shaped half-dormers and a central pair of triangular gables, both with banded jambs. Similar gables and dormers appear on the shorter east and west elevations. The latter has a small single-storey flat-roofed extension, and a much larger gabled extension has recently been built to the north; these lack special interest. Entrances with lintels inscribed BOYS, GIRLS and INFANTS indicate the former arrangement of the school.

INTERIORS: These are of the standard board-school type, with exposed steel girders supporting the hall ceilings, and timber roof trusses in the second-floor and attic classrooms. The second-floor corridors are lit by skylights, while those on the ground and first floors are overlooked by mezzanine offices, two of which contain fireplaces with simple timber surrounds. Internal windows and glazed screens separate the various rooms, most of which retain hardwood block floors and tiled dados, the latter now painted over. The stairwells are faced in white glazed brick, and have metal balustrades to their upper flights. There is a panelled oak Great War memorial in the second-floor hall, and a number of boys' and girls' honours boards, recording scholarships awarded between 1906 and 1927, in the western first-floor corridor and south-west stairwell. The ground floor classroom wing adjoining the hall has recently been opened up to form a second dining hall.

SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: Of special interest are the SCHOOL KEEPER'S COTTAGE at no. 60 Clancarty Road, of stock brick with a roughcast upper storey and a tiled gabled roof; WCs and open-sided SHEDS in the north-eastern and north-western corners of the playground; sturdy timber ENTRANCE GATES with wrought-iron overthrows set into the modern boundary fence on Clancarty Road.

HISTORY: The Peterborough School was established by the London School Board in 1901, in a building designed by the Board's architect, TJ Bailey. The school was closed by Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council in 2007; half of the building was leased to a French-language school, the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, and the other half taken over by another local primary school, the Queensmill.

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. 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 C19, that by the Edwardian period few neighbourhoods in London were without a red brick, Queen Anne style, three-storey school designed by ER Robson, the Board's architect, or his successor TJ 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.

SOURCES
SAVE Britain's Heritage, Beacons of Learning (1995)
Elain Harwood and Andrew Saint 'Report on Listing of London Board Schools' held at NMR (1991)
Timothy Walder, 'The evolution of the classic school design of the School Board for London (1870-1904): a reassessment of the role of Edward Robert Robson' (Institute of Education, University of London MA dissertation, 2006)
James Hall, 'The London Board Schools 1870-1904: Securing a Future for these Beacons of the Past' (University of Bath MSc. dissertation 2006-7)

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The former Peterborough School is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* It is an unusually handsome and well-preserved example of a London board school, designed by the Board's architect TJ Bailey and notable for its striking roofline of towers, gables and dormer;
* It contains an unusual collection of commemorative items comprising several school honours boards and a Great War memorial.

Reasons for Listing

The former Peterborough School is designated at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* It is an unusually handsome and well-preserved example of a London Board School, designed by the Board's architect TJ Bailey and notable for its striking roofline of towers, gables and dormers;
* It contains an unusual collection of commemorative items comprising several school honours boards and a Great War memorial.

External Links

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