The corner of Packington Street and Prebend Street, with Nos. 126-129 and Nos. 41-45 demolished. The resulting gap can be seen on the 1953 Ordnance Survey map.
During the Second World War the streets round Queen's Head Street School were heavily bombed. The pictures of Packington Street and Prebond Street show the gravity of the attacks. The curved piece of corrugated iron, thrown aside by the blast like an empty sweet wrapper, was an Anderson Shelter. Dug a few feet into the ground and covered with earth, they seemed to offer protection. No doubt it was full of people taking refuge from the planes, but it proved a paltry defence.
The local Air Raid Wardens kept a record of each incident, noting the date, the type of bomb and its location. These were marked on a series of maps which were later used to make a detailed map of all London bomb damage. A small part of it is reproduced here. `° Recently an architect consulted this map, about another part of London, when he was asked to rebuild a post-war house which had started to subside. The contractors were already five metres down and still bringing up complete window frames. Clearly the site had been a huge bomb crater, used later to dump bomb debris. Levelled and forgotten, it was marked on the map, ready to be the centre of a court case.
++PART OF ISLINGTON ON THE BOMBING MAP
++ADD LINK TO COPYRIGHT PLEASE
++PART OF ISLINGTON ON THE BOMBING MAP
++COMBINE bombing map p 39 and p50 to make this map in colour
The colours are rather different so it will nee some adjustment. Then add the colour key and the link about black and white copies please
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2 A SECOND LINK TO THE BLACK AND WHITE VERSIONS OF BOMBING MAP
The corner of Packington Street and Prebend Street, with Nos. 126-129
and Nos. 41-45 demolished. The resulting gap can be seen on the 1953
Ordnance Survey map.
The
rear of Prebend St. houses, with the houses cut wide open
and an Anderson
Shelter made of curved corrugated iron, blown aside, like paper.
The completely obliterated Windsor Street/Britannia Row
block.
Each Borough recorded its findings in its own way. Some used large ledgers: some a series of street cards, some individual pieces of paper. They can be consulted in most Borough Archives, but not in Camden. There, in a piece of mindless stupidity, the records were destroyed as a protest against War. People who had been killed were then obliterated from the record in a piece of gesture politics of the worst kind. They were not even given the dignity of a proper rcord of their deaths.
Some typical Islington Street Incidentcards
Courtesy of Islington Archive
Queen's Head Street had six recorded incidents on this card, one in the School Yard itself. They were all H.E. (high explosive). Other roads record IBs (incendiary bombs), land mines and later, V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets.
The whole led, over years of bombing, to derelict bomb sites full of weeds, to be left in some cases for years before the sites could be rebuilt.
Part of Islington on the Bombing Map
Bomb damage is marked in black
The 1953 Ordnance Survey map showing the immediate effect
of
the boming by opening up he Chantry Street entrance to the school.
The Bombing map had been completed by about 1946 and shows large areas of damage north of the school. The 1953 Ordnance Survey has not bothered to change the earlier map, except to blank out the demolished corner of Packington Street. No doubt the plans for the new, enlarged school were already blocked in. Some of the. patched houses were still occupied, but there was no point' in the surveyors re-measuring houses which were soon to be demolished.
Notice that the school site had been enlarged to take over the Builder's Yard and a new entrance cut through into Chantry Street.
There had many changes in the use of the school buildings between 1910 and 1945. The old Infants School Building, enlarged in 1910, had become part of the post-war Tudor Secondary School. During the Second World War some properties had been damaged and some patched up. We do not know how badly the Graded School building at the other end of the playground had fared. It is not marked as badly damaged on the Bombing Map.
Tudor School was on several scattered sites, waiting for new buildings to be ready. When the new Tudor Secondary School, now Islington Green, was announced In 1964, they were impatient to move.
The local newspaper announced the new school as follows:-.
Building Tudor Secondary School Extract from North London Press, 11 September, 1964 Work on the erection of Islington Green Secondary School, built at a total cost of £595,000 is rapidly nearing completion. The school, which will accommodate 1,200 boys and girls, aged from 11 to 19 years, occupies a site at the junction of Packington and Prebend Street, Islington. The staff and pupils at the nearby Tudor Secondary School, including those housed in buildings in Ritchie Street and Shepperton Road, hope to move into the main, six storey teaching block towards the end of October. The children in each of the six houses will have their own assembly and dining hall. Two gymnasia and a spacious games hall have also been provided, in addition to an engineering and science section, The existing Tudor School is to be remodelled to provide a fully-equipped technical section with workshops, machine shops and drawing offices. Tudor's headmaster, Mr. C.A.Noseworthy, has been appointed head of the new school. |
Tudor School shortly before the contractors handed over the building
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE NEW BUILDING
The new building was in reinforced concrete. This involved hundreds of drawings showing every detail of the construction - where to put the steel reinforcement bars, their sizes, the concrete thicknesses and mixtures, etc.. All this is far too complicated to go into here. One detail has been printed as an example of the care needed if reinforced concrete is to be strong, as light as possible and yet not crack and allow water to penetrate. If tiny cracks appear in the surface concrete, water can penetrate and rust the steel bars. When steel rusts, it expands with great force, splitting the outer concrete apart. Then more water penetrates and the rusting gets worse. Keeping the outside concrete cover thick enough to prevent water penetration, without making the whole structure too heavy, is a skilled process.
The quality of the drawing shows how pressed the architects were for time. Everything was a rush. At the end of the 1945 War London needed rebuilding. Houses, schools, hospitals. Everything. There was no time for fancy lettering. Quick, hand-written notes had to serve. Unreadable at this reduction, they were quick and serviceable. A Victorian architect would have been appalled, but he would not have been rebuilding after a major Blitz.
Today, the drawing would be made on a computer and the lettering typed in, quick and at the same time clear. Unfortunately, architectural computers were fifty years in the future.
Detail of the Reinforced Concrete Roof
The Inner London Education Committee took advantage of the enormous bomb damage to extend the school site. Queen's Head Street, which had been on the edge of the site, now runs down the centre. Large new blocks were added, low level gymnasiums built, and a future swimming pool was penciled in by some optimistic architect. New school plans were full of swimming baths in that heady, post-war period, before reality struck. Not one, so far as I know, was built.
The whole site sloped downwards towards the houses in Prebend Street. These had basements, so when they were demolished they left a deep trough at the bottom of the new site. Today one enters the school on a bridge over a chasm. The ground has been formed into a long retaining bank, or berm, to support the huge weight of the new school block towering above. This is interesting engineering. Without the berm the tower block would slip into the old basements.
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In 1971 a Sixth Form Extension was built on about half the area of the old 1910 'Marching Space'. The drawings show that four of the grilled openings in the parapet wall were replaced by timber-framed windows and the new building was faced with aluminium. Thus on the same roof space we have the old staircase with its Arts and Crafts roof, and the new building with huge float glass windows and aluminium cladding. The last two materials were not available to architects in 1910.
Aluminium would have been fiendishly expensive if it could have been obtained at all. It was developed after the First World War, mainly as a specialist material for the aircraft industry and did not become generally available as a building material until well after the Second World War. The float glass process was developed by Pilkingtons in the 1950s. Before that large sheets of glass were confined to shop windows and other special uses as they had to be cast and then polished, a slow and unhealthy process. This made plate glass very expensive indeed. School windows and the windows of ordinary houses, were made of plain glass, full of ripples and distortions and divided into small panes for cheapness and easy maintenance.
Thus the 1892 school roof and the 1971 sixth form extension, are interesting examples of different architects working with the materials which were available in their times and which could be afforded. It does not always work one way. Terra-cotta, affordable in 1892, would have been prohibitively expensive in 1971. Plate glass and aluminium were unobtainable at any price in say 1910. It s details like this that help us to `read` buildings.
This is the story of Islinton Green School Buildings to 1971. No doubt there will be plenty more to add about other aspects of the school by other people.