The Building of St Edward's School: A Chronology (1870 - 2020)

P AGE N O : 39

The Second Fifty Years

1923 - To allow for more Dining Room space, a large hut must be erected to take the place of the old Remove and to supply a new Form Room Excavation and instalment of ‘the new furnace’ (at a cost of ‘over £2,000’ (£153,600 today) against the North Wall which, in time, is intended to heat everything except the Sanatorium and the ‘New Buildings Group’- it proves a ‘very long business’. Included is the removal of ‘500-600 loads and a mass of concrete 6 feet thick had to be broken out’. Once complete the furnace will warm the Main Buildings, the Warden’s House, the Shop, the Indoor Bath, the Armoury, the Changing Room, the hut called Bishopstone (later Field House Room), and eventually Chapel and Big School ‘thus doing the work of eight former furnaces’ (October Chronicle) Three new huts erected numbered 1-3, additional huts constructed and together with the Chemical and Physics Laboratories now form a right angle occupying the southeastern corner of the land ‘behind the privet hedge’ ( Thomas Rayson design )(October Chronicle). This is the area where the Work Block stands today The old Remove now becomes a Dining Room and the New Remove is now in Bishopstone. The Chemical Laboratory has been ‘improved by re-arrangement’ (October Chronicle) Corner stone of the Memorial Buildings ( Harold Rogers design ) laid at noon on December 10 th by the Very Reverend Dr. W.H. Hutton, the Dean of Westminster. This is Rogers’s first School commission and work on the building actually starts on 18 th October (December Chronicle). In the lower part of the stone is inserted a glass vessel containing the School list of the term, the “Times” newspaper of 10 th December 1923 and the December ‘Chronicle’ The Memorial Buildings originally designed to stand at the South East corner of the Quadrangle, connected by a cloister to Big School and ‘eventually by a considerable block of buildings with the existing New Buildings’ ( Harold Rogers design ). The first plan includes two Laboratories, a large Classroom or Lecture Room and a Drawing Room at a cost of £10,000 - £12,000 (£768,000 - £921,600 today). However, between 1919-1922 the needs of the School change and the Laboratories are built within the wooden huts already mentioned and ‘thoroughly equipped’. Now with a greater need for dormitories, Class Rooms, Music Rooms and accommodation for teaching staff; the Committee therefore decide to change their minds both on the use of the building and the shape thereof. ‘As a building for living as well as teaching was now desired, it seemed natural to link it on to the New Buildings which had teaching and domestic and sanitary equipment, rather than Big School which lacked two of these desiderata’. Furthermore, it should have a less “monumental” character and should have a ‘definite entity of its own with a dignified frontage to the Quadrangle’. Joining the two buildings was no easy matter, with the existing style ‘Early English of the Early (eighteen) eighties - to tack it on the Memorial Buildings gave every opportunity of spoiling both’. The solution is to place the Memorial Buildings in advance of the New Buildings frontage and east of them ‘by forming a connecting block, lower in height (and) between the two buildings with an entrance porch of some pretension directly opposite the central path of the Quadrangle’ (Rogers) Within the Memorial Building on the ground floor would be a new Sanitary Block, five Music Rooms and ‘through a back door the Laboratories are reached’. Two square Class Rooms would face the Quadrangle, a set of Masters’ Rooms facing south and a large Day Room measuring 39 feet by 18 feet 6 inches at the end facing north and south. Nearby would be a stone staircase ‘in easy flights’ with broad landings to the floors above. On the first floor there would be a further large Class Room (the same