The Schools
The 1950s Hertfordshire schools and those designed by the A&BB in the 1950s and 60s came to constitute a canon for educationalists and designers in the English regions during these years. These were mainly schools for younger children but there were also secondary schools amongst the better-known and most celebrated. Certain schools attracted a great deal of national and international attention. Study tours were conducted, publications, films, exhibitions and articles were produced in several different languages indicating international as well as national interest. These schools demonstrated elegance in construction reflecting the best in engineering and use of new materials, utility and sobriety in cost-planning, and respect for the visual arts through integrating work by some of the best artists in the country at the time. Educational achievement was also viewed as important but was not the most vital immediate consideration as that was expected inevitably to follow in time with the school in action. That they were visually pleasing, welcoming, warm and vibrant places, supporting a complex variety of different learning situations would, it was believed, eventually ensure a raising of standards. But more than this, the schools would encourage development of character and self belief to the extent that children would confidently and securely move from the primary to secondary school and beyond.
While the earlier Hertfordshire schools were not notably advanced in their educational practice, by the mid 1960s there was clear evidence, in primary schools designed under the influence of the Development Group of a move towards realizing progressive practices through the material environment. In this sense, education and architecture grew more inter-related; architects were increasingly knowledgable and expert in education while some teachers were becoming spacious in their reflection on their practice. We shall see that this confidence was strengthened by a Trans-Atlantic and European consensus among progressive educators and architects as to how schools of the future, especially for the younger child, should look and feel. For older children, a parallel approach envisaged a place that at its heart embodied a vision of learning through engagement of body, hands and mind.
This period witnessed a massive growth in media and communications in traditional and new popular forms. In England, the architectural press regularly featured articles on schools and nurseries stressing their domesticity, comfort and progressive pedagogies. Publication of the Plowden Report on primary education in 1967 spurred further interest in the subject and in 1972 BBC TV produced a series of documentary films about seven schools entitled ‘The Expanding Classroom’.1 At Eveline Lowe primary school in Southwark, London, the programme opened with a view inside the ‘kiva’ room where children relaxed on high bunks, and potted plants surrounded the presenter who remarked, ‘while this might look like a home, it is in fact a school’.2
By the time of Mary’s retirement in the early 1970s, school, at least for the young, was becoming a more comfortable and certainly a more open environment. This placed new demands on a teaching profession that was in the main poorly equipped to teach inside anything other than a box-like classroom. However, in pockets around the country, particularly in Oxfordshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire as well as in London, were teachers committed to new ways of realizing their vocation. They were supported by a network of Chief Education Officers, local advisers and HMI who understood the need for teachers to become more spacious in their thinking.
Not only did these schools attract attention from UK media, but they were of international interest too. In the mid-1960s, a team of educators and film makers from Norway, led by Torvald Slettebø spent six weeks in various Oxfordshire schools, including Finmere, to record and study how they operated, paying attention to how the building supported teaching and learning. The results were published in a booklet entitled ‘Åpne Skoler’ (Open Schools). Slettebø also made a documentary about schools in the West Riding of Yorkshire which was broadcast on Norwegian television as well as 20 films for national TV marketing Oxfordshire ideas. These had a profound effect on the design of Norwegian schools at the time.3
Development project schools were the outcome of meticulous educational planning. While standardized prefabricated parts were used in some early examples, no school was the same, and nothing was repeated exactly. Rather, knowledge was gained in the process of design and construction on each commission that helped to shape the next project. Mary and David usually worked together on each building from the planning stages through to publication of a Building Bulletin outlining in full detail knowledge gained from the process. Their approach also pervaded the general work of A&BB between 1949 and 1972. The development projects themselves only constituted a small part of their total activity; they spent a greater proportion of time on design studies and investigations. A full list of schools completed during these years is given below, where schools on which the Medds worked directly are indicated.4
5.1 Front cover of booklet ‘Åpne Skoler’. IOE Archives, ME/G/19/1
5.2 Back cover of booklet ‘Åpne Skoler’. IOE Archives, ME/G/19/1
ST CRISPIN’S SECONDARY MODERN SCHOOL, WOKINGHAM, BERKSHIRE; MINISTRY OF EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT GROUP (JOB ARCHITECTS DAVID MEDD, MARY CROWLEY, MICHAEL VENTRIS) BUILT 1951–1953. HILLS SYSTEM. LISTED 1993. EXTENSIONS ADDED WHEN THE SCHOOL BECAME A COMPREHENSIVE, 19765
The first school designed and built by the Ministry of Education as a forerunner to promote ideas about secondary modern education and to test the cost limits for school building imposed in 1950, St Crispin’s was designed to accommodate 600 boys and girls, and so was far larger than the primary schools A&B Branch had produced hitherto. It contained a multi-storey ‘tower’ that boldly announced the school within a 49 acre site. The technical aspects of the design, completed by David Medd, adapted the Hills standardized system, now based on a smaller 3 foot 4 inch grid. One of the technical goals of this school was to ‘take prefabrication upstairs’, in Stirrat Johnson-Marshall’s phrase.
Mary together with HMI Leonard Gibbon, worked out the accommodation needs and David remembered it as ‘an anxious moment for us, because it was the first school to demonstrate the new cost limit regime’.6 Andrew Saint has remarked on the challenge of designing this new type of secondary school and how it proved more difficult than designing for primary education. He also claims that St Crispin’s at Wokingham probably had more influence in its educational planning than any other British school built since the Second World War.7 It was certainly noticed outside the UK and was included in Alfred Roth’s selection of the most significant schools for his 1957 edition of The New School. Its impact was due to a combination of factors not least of which was the relative informality of its architecture and the suggestion, through the spaces and facilities provided, of a more integrated approach to education in academic and vocational subjects. The extensive gardens reflected not only a recognition that many pupils would leave school for careers in horticulture but also John Newsom’s particular emphasis on strengthening links between gardening and the natural sciences.8
According to Roth, the most distinguishing feature of St Crispin’s was its successful combining of classrooms in one four-storey building with the loose grouping of special purpose or common rooms in single storey blocks surrounding it. ‘This principle of concentration and decentralization in one and the same layout gives, in spite of its size, a happy impression of variety and intimacy.’9 He also noted the feature of a common area provided for every three classroom groups to support project and group work, as well as the provision of somewhat larger (616 square foot) classrooms intended for more informal teaching and learning. General teaching rooms arranged in a classroom block had adjoining workrooms with sinks and benches.10 Here we see Mary’s ingredients of planning and a belief in the application of planning principles developed in primary and infant schools adapted in an appropriate fashion for the older child.
It did however prove more difficult to break the mould in secondary school typology and to realize a radically different form of school to stand in equal parity of esteem alongside the grammar school.11 At St Crispin’s the plan became in David’s words ‘a straightforward expression of the school curriculum’.12 However, there was more scope for experimentation in such a school especially if led by a sympathetic personality and the first head teacher to serve at the school was noted for his more informal approach to discipline.13 Mary and David had time to investigate the subject with Michael Ventris (1922–1956)14 as a team member and David remarked ‘In these projects, one of many such, we never expected to produce a better school, but one which would display some principles we upheld, some fruits of our investigation, some ideas which may be beneficial and even some to avoid.’15
5.3 Plan of St Crispin’s Secondary Modern School, Wokingham. Development Group, A&BB, MofEd in collaboration with Berkshire County Council. IOE Archives, ME/V/2/7
St Crispin’s did contain elements of a radical reappraisal of a school for children less academic than their peers selected by examination for grammar school. However, at secondary level a deeply entrenched separation of curriculum subjects taught in their own classroom spaces operated, and as the school population grew, the common areas attached to classrooms and intended for group work soon came to be taken over as general classrooms. At some point in its history, walls were erected to produce more classrooms from common and general work areas. A further consequence of that was the cramping of circulation areas, something the Medds had carefully tried to avoid; the original plan virtually eliminated corridors – the dining area and small hall doubling as circulation space in the same way that would be achieved at Woodside Primary (below) some years later.
5.4 A&BB at St Crispin’s school with MBC tucked behind group with L. Gibbon. IOE Archives, ME/E/1/2
St Crispin’s was a statement of Modernism and the design of its buildings declared that the most innovative environments were required as a means of coming to know what a secondary modern school might be. One of the several unusual features of St Crispin’s was a 36 foot high ‘skylon’ equipped with meteorological instruments, a scaled down model of the 300 foot structure erected on the South Bank as a showpiece for the 1951 Festival of Britain.16 This was built in the handicraft workshops by an inspired teacher and pupils a short time after the school opened,17 and stood as a visual symbol of St Crispin’s as a modern school fit for the technological challenges of the future.
The school building was remarkable in other ways and featured ceiling decorations and murals representing the seasons designed by Fred Millett.18 There was also a mural by Oliver Cox installed along the outer long wall of the dining room. While these aesthetic features were admired at the official opening of the school, a boy leaning out of a window was reported as shouting ’If it had been built in marble it would still be a bloody school.’ The school attracted national and international attention as ‘An Experiment in School Architecture’.19 As the local press reported on its opening, ‘the building differs radically from the usual conventional planning for the entire design has been based on educational needs and not on a preconceived plan pattern’.20 The architects John Stillman and John Eastwick-Field wrote a series of articles about the technical development of the school for The Architects’ Journal published in 1952 and 1953.21
5.5 Pupils and teacher erecting a ‘skylon’ at St Crispin’s School. The tower was equipped with meteorological measuring devices. IOE Archives, ABB/A/3/7
5.6 Mural ‘Modular Girl’ by Fred Millett and Oliver Cox, St Crispin’s School. IOE Archives, ME/E/1/2
There was much that was technically new about St Crispin’s but more important in situating Mary and her influence was its design around a set of distinctive educational ideas. These were not entirely her own but arrived at in collaboration with HMI Leonard Gibbon, a respected special adviser for secondary education deriving ideas quite probably from conversations with pioneering secondary heads such as Alex Bloom. In a similar fashion to the new thinking on primary schools, the secondary modern was declared to have grown ‘out of the problem itself – the educational needs and activities of its parts’.22 While there were no preconceptions to the design, Mary would have had in mind the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges conceived under the direction of Henry Morris, and certainly the mural art by Fred Millet and Oliver Cox were of a quality that Morris would have approved. The provision for informal drama and musical activities achieved through a split level ‘small hall’ underlines the centrality of arts in the curriculum as envisaged. The ideal that children would learn through first hand experience and practical activities as well as through traditional methods was an important aspect of the education to be developed in such schools.
Such an arrangement corresponds to the Crow Island elementary school already well known and celebrated among the architectural profession, and provides evidence that for the Medds, principles of planning for the younger child were applicable and adaptable in secondary schools.
WOODSIDE JUNIOR SCHOOL, AMERSHAM, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE; MINISTRY OF EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT GROUP (JOB ARCHITECTS J. S. B. COATMAN, MARY CROWLEY, DAVID MEDD, CLIVE WOOSTER) BUILT 1956–1957. LISTED 199323
5.7 Mary with colleagues on site at Amersham, 1956. IOE Archives, ME/D/22
I remember well at Woodside school, Amersham we decided to have a pond and a shelter in the courtyard come what may, which was put in at the start, not something to be cut out at the end.24
This was the first non-prefabricated construction by the Architects and Building Branch of the Ministry of Education and involved a large team consisting of ten architects and assistant architects, seven quantity surveyors and assistants and a senior member of HMI. However, the Medd stamp is visible throughout. With characteristic respect for scale, comfort and well-being, the Medds considered that the junior school child was relatively deprived ‘commanding no more area than a 5–6 year old yet with pupils who are larger and covering a wider curriculum’. Woodside was the research response. Designed in cooperation with Buckinghamshire LEA, it was a two form entry (eight class) junior school. Research underpinning its design was rooted in careful measurements of children’s physiological characteristics and the Building Bulletin published as the school opened its doors contained detailed information on average elbow heights from the floor of children of junior school age. From this the heights of door handles, drinking fountains, standing work surfaces, wall-benching, heater cabinets, moving lockable units and storage units – the tops of which were intended as working surfaces – were arrived at. The range of eye levels of children, seated and standing, was calculated to inform heights of mirrors and window transoms so that the view out to the nearby landscape would not be interrupted. Various body measurements and analyses of children’s posture formed the basis of design for tables and chairs.25
5.8 Plan of Woodside Primary School at Amersham. Development Group, A&BB, MofEd in collaboration with Buckinghamshire County Council. IOE Archives, ME/V/2/7
Each classroom was planned to be different in character and grouped in four pairs, one for each year, with ample space; 4.39 square foot per pupil for a total of 320 pupils. Each of the eight classroom spaces were designed as a separate entity with a character of their own and arranged in two groups of four to facilitate cooperation between classes and to avoid the need for corridors. Constructed in brick and designed to incorporate some of the rationalization already realized in system building, each pair of classrooms for the four year groups was designed to reflect the developing curriculum.26 Each pair of classrooms shared use of a linked practical space or bay where children might carry out large-scale work such as modeling or construction as supported in a similar fashion at Crow Island School in Winnetka.27 The hall, square rather than oblong, provided a link between the two sets of classrooms. The outside environment was planned with as much care as the inside. The interior court provided a focal point and was planted to significantly increase and enhance educational possibilities, a space that was ‘always full of activity’. A series of small linked courtyards formed by the arrangement of the buildings created what David Medd called ‘the heart of the school’. These courtyards were planned with the idea that they would serve the whole curriculum, becoming the school’s shared focus. ‘The courtyard was as much the teaching area as the non-teaching area so to speak.’28
5.9 The courtyard at Woodside School, Amersham. IOE Archives, ME/E/4/9
5.10 Children building a model town in the general work area attached to their classroom at Woodside School, Amersham. IOE Archives, ME/E/4/10
5.11 Light fitting designed by David Medd. IOE Archives, ME/E/4/12
Woodside was a light and bright school, ample fenestration creating an open atmosphere. Lighting was considered not only in terms of engineering but also through careful attention to the likely educational arrangements to be experienced in any location. The Medds were confident that ‘most of the work would go on in small groups in all parts of the room, and not always in straight lines facing one direction, (this) emphasized the importance of good lighting everywhere, in whatever direction a child might face’.29 To support the research, scaled models were made of each of the workrooms to test the effects of both lighting and colour. Artificial lighting was used but with careful avoidance of the institutional effect this can often bring by means of using seven different styles of light fitting. It was felt that local lighting in the bays of workrooms above wall-benching, would provide a welcome change of character. Lampshades designed for this purpose included cylindrical ’tins’ perforated top and bottom, made from polished and lacquered copper, closely resembling those that Mary and David had observed and sketched in Finland while visiting Aalto’s Finnish Engineers’ Club in Helsinki.30
Due to careful gathering of anthropometric data, Woodside saw major advances in furniture design where all items were designed by David, contributing to newly published British Standards Institution specifications for furniture. As in many of the schools designed at the time, the Medds were able to enhance the unique character of spaces by integrating original art work into the building. In this case, ceramicist Dorothy Annan produced decorative tiles for the splash backs of drinking fountains and sinks designed by Adamsez to David Medd’s specifications (Figs 5.12, 5.13 and 5.14). In this way it was intended that ‘the craftsman’s contribution should be associated with the things one uses, ubiquitous and not confined to one selected spot’.31 Annan produced a mixture of animal designs including a sketch of cockerel and snails with a dark blue line on a yellow background that one reviewer thought ‘extremely lively’.32
HMI Robin Tanner made a formal inspection of the school at its opening and was delighted with the building. ‘There were no surprises anywhere. Coming into the building was rather like coming home’. He had expected to see fine attention to detail and was not disappointed.
I found myself drawing door and window fastenings, the display units etc – nothing has been left to chance. The use of hanging textiles (and the lovely choice of these) gives what most new schools lack, namely an inhabited and cared for appearance. Texture everywhere is as important as colour … the link too with the outside world (in colour) is extremely satisfying (and) the scale of everything seems absolutely so right for children.33
5.12 Sinks with splash back tiles by Dorothy Annan. IOE Archives, ME/E/4/9
5.13 Water fountain with decorative tiles (fish motif) by Dorothy Annan. IOE Archives, ME/E/4/12
5.14 Water fountain with decorative tiles (cockerel and snail) by Dorothy Annan. IOE Archives, ME/E/4/12
On the other hand, Tanner was already disappointed with the newly appointed head teacher and ten class teachers, finding only one of them suitably appreciative of the potential offered by the building.34 The head teacher lined pupils’ desks in rows and chose a traditional approach not entirely in sympathy with what the design offered or permitted. Tanner was also scathing about the head teacher’s wife who, filling a gap as a temporary teacher, had ‘introduced pitifully vulgar and ugly cut-out friezes into the (class) room, which I hope the Medds will never have to see!’
For decades, the teaching staff at the school effectively resisted the building and the Medds were disappointed to the extent that they did not return for many years. However, for a short time during the late 1960s the school began to operate in ways more akin to the progressive philosophy and practice that the Medds had intended. This was under the headship of Gordon Morris, 1967–1971.35 At this time Christian Schiller visited the school during the 1970s on a number of occasions, the last time with Mary in July 1977 shortly after its conversion by the Medds into a middle school.36 Student teachers attending Schiller’s London University of Education teacher training course were taken to Woodside regularly which he declared was his favourite primary school. But the conjoining of architecture and education at Woodside was short-lived. In 1982, on visiting, David Medd noted the fall in the numbers of children attending and was disappointed to see that while no accommodation was closed off, ‘the extensions’ meaning the workspaces ‘are little more than a repository for furniture’.37 The story of Woodside underlines the importance of teachers understanding and being in sympathy with the intentions of the designers and it is through habitation that the possibilities are realized or rejected.
FINMERE VILLAGE SCHOOL, OXFORDSHIRE; MINISTRY OF EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT GROUP (JOB ARCHITECTS DAVID AND MARY MEDD WITH PAT TINDALE, BUILT 1958–1959. ENLARGED 1973, LISTED 1993)38
Initially, the Ministry of Education had invited Mary and David to speak on the subject of ‘the village school’ at an event in Buckinghamshire and to write a Building Bulletin