inner–london schools 1918–44 a thematic study - English Heritage

Fig. 16: A geography lesson in an open-air classroom atNorth Hammersmith Central School, , L B Hammersmith andFulham (LCC AD; 1931). (L M A : SC /PHL /02/0267-25; City ofLondon, London Metropolitan Archives).The open-air schools (see page70) acheived similar ends by meansof a different planning technique:separate-block planning. 13 Theterm as used here refers to thepolarisation of the functions of aschool into clusters of separate,freestanding blocks, connected by apath or covered way (see Appendix4). Margaret McMillan commented,‘the form of the open-air nurseryschools is not one large building,but many small shelters: a collectionof small townships; of small classes,each one self-contained’. 14 Thisisolating plan was developed inhospitals and workhouses in the 19 thcentury as an alternative to a singlebuilding which improved ventilationand inhibited contagious disease. 15Introduced to the design of theLCC’s open-air schools, it had theadded advantage of noise insulationand integration with the maturelandscapes of their sites. Each formwas associated with a specificactivity—teaching, dining, resting—and the whole was informal, diffuseand less ‘institutional’: there were nogrand entrances in open-air schools,for example.Fig. 17: Wilmot Street School, L B Tower Hamlets (LCC AD;1931). (L M A: uncatalogued album entitled ‘LCC schoolssection photographs’; City of London, London MetropolitanArchives).From the early 1920s, aspects ofopen-air school design began toinfluence mainstream schools inLondon, largely though the provisionof outdoor terraces and openairclassrooms ‘capable of beingthrown almost entirely open’. 16Full-height, folding French windowsor partially-glazed screens alloweddirect access from classroom toplayground, and corridors were transformed into open verandas or access galleries, anarrangement pioneered by Hutchings and Widdows in Staffordshire and Derbyshirerespectively. This arrangement was at first met by teachers with enthusiasm but by theLCC with caution, as recorded in the minutes of a 1925 meeting with representativesof the London Headteachers’ Association: ‘the teachers were enthusiastically in favour© ENGLISH H ER I TAG E 43 - 20 0927