a) Time

The School Board for London (SBL) was brought into existence by the “Forster” Education Act of 1870 and this makes a logical starting point. Although there were elementary schools in London before 1870, these were mainly the product of church or charity exertions. 1870 marks the beginning of directly provided state education and is a fault line both politically and architecturally.

 

1914 has been selected as an end date for a number of reasons. This project had the support of The Victorian Society during its gestation, whose terms of reference end in 1914. In that year a decisive break with the Victorian past came as the Architect’s Department of the London County Council (LCC) was finally moved into the new County Hall on the South Bank. The years of the First World War also saw very little school building activity (a few schools already begun in 1914 were completed in 1915 and these, the last gasp of the Victorian era, are included here). After the war, the LCC returned to the earlier practice of commissioning outside architects by tender, and these schools are different.

 

b) Place

Geographically, the area covered is that of the SBL from 1870 to 1904 and the LCC from 1904. This is almost identical with the area of the 12 modern Inner London Boroughs plus the City of London. Local authorities in what are now the Outer London Boroughs had their own school boards and built their own schools. This website does not include information on those schools, fine though many are. Nor does this website include sites owned and operated by the SBL but located outside its area (for example the Industrial Schools on the Medway or the Schools for the Delicate on the South Coast).

 

c) Type

This website does not include details of any church or independent schools. Occasionally a school featured is now under the control of a church or is an independent school. This is because at some point the building erected by the SBL has passed into other hands. Nor does this website include details of the various ancillary buildings constructed by the SBL. Towards the end of its life, these included higher grade schools, teacher training schools, centres for manual instruction, arts and science blocks, domestic training, cookery and laundry centres, schools for the blind, deaf and “mentally defective” and divisional and superintendents’ offices.

 

Temporary schools have been something of a problem. The SBL’s practice was to plant a new school (especially one in a developing suburb) through the use of pre-fabricated iron buildings. Some buildings of this type survive (for example at the Gordon School in Greenwich) although not in use as schools. The normal practice, if the school in the iron buildings was a success, was to build the new school alongside. The iron buildings were then removed to another new location, leaving an area for the playground. Some temporary schools were not a success (in terms of attracting enough children) and were abandoned. Thus schools described in contemporary lists as “temporary” may either have vanished or become a permanent school. Apart from the “huts” at the Gordon School, there is no known instance of a “temporary” school surviving in that form. Temporary schools have thus been omitted from this website.

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