Coal Hill School is a fictional school in the television series Doctor Who. It is a comprehensive school located in the Shoreditch area of London.
The Coal Hill School is the setting of much of the very first episode of the series, "An Unearthly Child", first broadcast in November 1963. The episode takes place in the same year. In the episode, two teachers at the school, science teacher Ian Chesterton and history teacher Barbara Wright, discover that one of their students, Susan Foreman, is an alien time traveller who has been attending the school as her grandfather, the Doctor (the central character of the series), makes repairs on their time machine, the TARDIS.
The school appeared in the series again almost twenty-five years later in the October 1988 story Remembrance of the Daleks. In this serial, a nostalgia-laden tribute to the show that kicked off its 25th anniversary season, the Seventh Doctor returns to 1963 to complete some business left unfinished by his hurried departure on the previous occasion. The school is a featured location, as a group of Daleks set up a base there while attempting to locate a powerful Time Lord artifact, the Hand of Omega, the Doctor had previously hidden in the area.
Sam Jones, a companion from the Eighth Doctor Adventures spin-off novels, also attended Coal Hill School. In the 2010 episode The Vampires of Venice, the Eleventh Doctor briefly produces a library card from Shoreditch Library with the photo ID of his original incarnation.
Famous quotes containing the words coal, hill and/or school:
“The discovery of Pennsylvanias coal and iron was the deathblow to Allaire. The works were moved to Pennsylvania so hurriedly that for years pianos and the larger pieces of furniture stood in the deserted houses.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“What was dancing to you then?
We went from the high gate away
To a black hill the other side of men
Where one wild stag stared
At the going day.”
—Allen Tate (18991979)
“You send a boy to school in order to make friendsthe right sort.”
—Virginia Woolf (18821941)