Buildings
Because of the generosity of its benefactors, the school has a number of excellent buildings which are continually refurbished. The centre of the school is occupied by the 1911 Building, which over the years has been extended to include an extension to the library and which is now attached to the science and technology blocks and the new (2006) building.
In the summer of 1999 the school completed the Cripps Hall, named in honour of Sir Humphrey Cripps, a former pupil of the school. It includes a theatre used for school productions and concerts as well as public performances. The building is home to the School's Expressive Arts and Modern Foreign Languages departments.
Beginning in 2005, the school has had a refurbishment and building programme, called Project 465 (the school was to be 465 years old when finished, but because of building delays it was 466), which was finished in early 2007. One of the purposes of the programme was to accommodate the newly added years sevens and eights. Constructed in a post-modern style, the building features new English and mathematics classrooms, alongside two new ICT suites, a sixth form lounge (known colloquially as "The Pod") a 'restaurant/bistro' and a concourse for indoor recreation at breaktimes.
One of the innovations brought with the new building is a system of cashless catering, where students pay for any meals bought by having their fingerprint scanned; the money is then deducted from an account which can be topped-up either by credit card from home, or through a machine in the concourse. The school hopes to extend the cashless system in future to pay for school trips, music lessons, the school shop and the library. In practice, many of the scanners read pupils' fingerprints quickly and consistency, reducing queuing times.
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Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
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—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)