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:
“Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.”
—Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961)
“The hill farmer ... always seems to make out somehow with his corn patch, his few vegetables, his rifle, and fishing rod. This self-contained economy creates in the hillman a comparative disinterest in the world’s affairs, along with a disdain of lowland ways. “I don’t go to question the good Lord in his wisdom,” runs the phrasing attributed to a typical mountaineer, “but I jest cain’t see why He put valleys in between the hills.””
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)