Buildings
The original school, which stood in St Paul's Churchyard, was destroyed with the Cathedral in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The school was twice rebuilt, first in 1670, and again in Cheapside in 1822; but towards the end of the 19th century, as London expanded and residents moved away from the City of London and its environs, it was decided that the school should move to larger premises.
In 1884 a new building designed by the architect Alfred Waterhouse rose to dominate the countryside of Hammersmith. The terracotta for the Hammersmith school was made by the famous Gibbs and Canning Limited of Tamworth. At this time the street numbering was changed locally and so the school address, whether by accident or design, became 153 Hammersmith Road. The preparatory school, Colet Court, was soon afterwards housed in new premises in a similar style on the opposite side of the road.
In September 1939 the school was evacuated to Easthampstead Park, near Crowthorne in Berkshire, where, under the then High Master, W. F. Oakeshott, it became solely a boarding school for the period of the war. Playing fields and some other facilities were borrowed from nearby Wellington College, but the boys and the teachers from the two schools remained entirely separate.
In the meantime, the London buildings became the headquarters of XXI Army Group under the command of General, later Field-Marshal, Bernard Montgomery, himself an Old Pauline. There the military side of the invasion of Europe was planned, including the D-Day landings. The map that he used is still present in the modern day site of the school in the Montgomery Room. The school recovered its buildings in September 1945, and resumed life essentially as a day school, although it retains a small number of boarders to this day.
By 1961 it had become evident that the old school buildings were unsuited to modern educational needs. By good fortune, the opportunity then came to rebuild the School on a 45 acre (182,000 m²) riverside site at Barnes, adjacent to Hammersmith Bridge. This land had previously been the site of reservoirs which were filled in, reputedly with earth excavated during the construction of the Victoria Line. The sports pitches took a long time to settle, and competitive matches were not played regularly at the Barnes site until summer 1979.
The present and fifth School buildings were opened in September 1968, to designs by architects Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya. The new site also includes St Paul's Preparatory School, or Colet Court, whose pupils account for roughly one half of the senior school's intake each year. The Waterhouse building on Hammersmith Road was demolished amid protests to allow building of flats, apart from the gates and the peripheral walls, the High Master's House, and a toolhut, though the Colet Court building also survives.
The 1968 buildings include a 25m, 6 lane swimming pool and dining hall shared with Colet Court. Extensive sports facilities notably included a fencing salle, five fives courts and three squash courts. The location next to the River Thames meant that a rowing boathouse was included in the plans, which itself included both an indoor training tank and housing to accommodate a boatman, whose primary job was to build and maintain the boats. A striking and deliberate omission from the new buildings was any provision for a school hall capable of holding all masters and boys simultaneously, and although the main sports hall is large enough to accommodate the entire school, the difficulty in setting up enough chairs means that the hall is used to house the entire school only twice per year. There were originally two boarding houses in the 1968 buildings (School House and High House) accommodating up to 120 boarders, but the number of boarders has steadily declined since then and is now only 20. One of the boarding houses has been demolished to make way for a new music building, which houses the Wathen Hall. The only building which remained from the previous Water Board landowners became the music department for Colet Court.
The original buildings were built using a modular system of interlocking concrete slabs, known as the CLASP system. This allowed for relatively quick and cheap construction, and allowed for the fact that much of the site was formed from reservoir land which was still settling. The whole complex is now in need of replacement; the only existing buildings likely to remain are the Music school, incorporating the Wathen Hall from 1999 and the Rackets Court.
Read more about this topic: St Paul's School, London
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