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

LAN ANCE SURVEY PLANwithout maintenance for the duration of hostilities. 80 This prompted a wider, and oftencritical, reappraisal of the school stock, which lumped in board schools and the recentcouncil schools alike: C.G. Stillman, from 1945 the county architect of Middlesex,pronounced them an ‘odd collection of old and obsolete schools, largely over-crowded,incapable of improvement and hopelessly inefficient in every way’. 81 Denis Clarke Hallrecalled in 1999, ‘the Butler Act of 1944 made pretty well every school in the county outof date’. 82 The London School Plan of 1947 adopted the same tabula rasa tone: ‘neithersites nor buildings, even of the best and most recent secondary schools, reach thestandards set by the Minister’s regulations’. 83The post-war challenges faced by those in the Ministry of Education and the localauthorities who found themselves undertaking school rebuilding programmes were‘unprecedentedly great’. 84 These included the educational demands of the Wood report,a near-bankrupt economy, and a significant rise in nursery and infant places (the childpopulation rose sharply from 1942 to 1948 for the first time since 1901). 85 The answerssometimes came from unexpected quarters, such as the war-time experience of StirratJohnson-Marshall (1912-81) and David Medd (1917-2009) researching, designing andimplementing decoys for the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at FarnhamCastle, which influenced their postwar work at Hertfordshire and later the Research Unitat the Ministry of Education. 86But the solutions taken forward after 1944—light and dry construction, prefabrication,standardisation of parts and separate-block planning—did not entirely emerge from theexpediencies of wartime improvisation. Lightly prefabricated construction was in usein London’s open-air schools from c.1908, and separate-block planning first employedaround the same time at Uffculme, again an open-air school. Those involved in thepost-war school-building programme had a tendency to downplay the progressiveinter-war precursors, which in fact offered tried-and-tested prototypes which could beeconomically developed on a large scale. The 1930s West Sussex schools of C.G. Stillman(see page 33) were the basis of the post-war schools built on the 8’3” bay module,including Stillman’s Middlesex schools and the LCC schools of the 1950s under DeputyArchitect Leslie Martin.Fig 77 (left): Charlton Park Open-Air School, L B Greenwich (LCC AD, 1929; dem.).Fig 78 (right): The I L E A special school which replaced it in 1964-66 retained the separate-block layout.(Ordnance survey plans of 1954 and 1970.© Crown Copyright. All rights reserved. English Heritage 100019088. 2009).© ENGLISH H ER I TAG E 43 - 20 0980