The History of Islington Green School from 1884 -1991

The site is now occupied by City of London Academy
which will be able to continue the History if it chooses to do so.

Introduction

Since 1884 the Islington Green School site has held three separate sets of school buildings which have been enlarged and adapted over the decades. The school names have changed over the years. It was reorganised in 1911, and 1934-36. In 1947-1951 it became Tudor Secondary School for Boys and Girls. In 1954 it became a Senior Mixed School and then became Islington Green Mixed Comprehensive in 1965. In September 2008 it became City of London Academy.

The small first site has expanded, taking over houses and gardens, a builder's yard, and a complete road, in its search for space. As a result the site is at a mass of different levels which seem to make no sense, but in fact fossilize what was there years ago. There are the sloping remains of Queen's Head Street which used to be at one edge of the site. In the centre are the garden levels of the old houses. These had once been the levels of the old hay fields of the 1840s. Last are the trenches left by the rows of old house basements which used to line the fringes of the original school.

Islington Green School Site in 1991

The two sketched sections of the 1991 Site Plan, AA and BB, are designed to give some idea of the different levels to be found across the modern site, but they are not measured. Perhaps some day pupils will survey the site accurately and reveal the real history of each piece. Then they could put the 1870 Ordnance Survey map on this and the site would come to life.

These uneven levels tell us something too about the surface geology. If the underlying soil was clay, the basement trenches would be ponds full of water. They are dry, so it must be a gravel area, self draining, and greatly favoured by the early builders. No London builder ventured onto the clay until 1870, when all available gravel sites had been used up. When they did house design had to change. Houses were lifted up above the wet clay and cellars were restricted to damp coal holes. The whole school area has archaeological, geological, and building interest.

The school name has changed over the years. Queen’s Head Street School was re-organised in 1911, and 1934-36. In 1947-1951 it became Tudor Secondary School for Boys and Girls. In 1954 it became a Senior Mixed School called Tudor School, and became Islington Green Mixed Comprehensive in 1965. In September 2008 it became City of London Academy.

This section of the website will try to unravel the complicated story of the schools and the site to 1991. Let us go right back to the beginning.

The Compulsory Education Act of 1870

In 1870 Parliament passed an Act which required all children to attend school from the age of five to thirteen. Up to this time many did not go to school at all, or attended now and then when they could be spared from working to help the family income or to look after younger children while their parents worked. Many of those who did attend school went to tiny dame schools in private houses. There they paid a few pence each week to be taught to read and write by unqualified teachers. There were some good schools but these were very expensive and only the rich could afford the fees. There were also Ragged Schools funded by contributions and charity sermons. Concerned adults, untrained and unpaid, taught poor children the rudiments in their spare time.

The Government was now proposing compulsory free education for all boys and girls from the age of 5 to 13.. For this they needed to build hundreds of schools as quickly as possible, but where? The Government set up Local School Boards which were locally elected, Both men and women had a vote and men and women could be elected to serve on the Boards. This was years before the Suffragettes won for women to vote for Parliament. Women grasped the opportunity and became very active in Education.

The first task facing the Boards was to find the sites and then to build. The project was so enormous all over London, that it was not until 1884, fourteen years after the Act was passed, that the School Board could explore Islington for sites.  

The London School Board and the Site

Finding the Site of the
Queens' Head Street School

When the London School Board was set up in 1870, it began to look for sites. This was not always easy in the centre of town, as the schools had to be within easy walking distance of the pupils’ homes. The Board Schools were to be for children aged 5 to 13, so the younger ones would have to be taken to school and back by older children. There were no school dinners at this time, so this would mean four trips a day. The children would not be able to afford to go to school by bus as so many do today. There were no cars and everyone walked, so the schools had to be very close indeed. The building load was so heavy that it was not until 1883 that the Board found a suitable site in this part of Islington.

A narrow row of old houses in Queen’s Head Street belonging to the Clothworkers Company had be.n found some months before. Let the Inspector and the School Board minutes take up the story:

28 February, 1884 Page 670 para. 22

A letter sent to the Education Department forwarding a copy of the report of Her Majesty's Inspector said:

The Inspector's phrase, 'when the considerations that are not unfairly urged', suggests that there had been some special pleading. No doubt particular estate agents, or other interested parties, had pressed their claims rather too strongly, but the decision was clear, Queen's Head Street was thought to be the best site.

Minutes of the London School Board, December 1883 - May 1884 –

(now held at the London Metropolitan Archive, Northampton Road,
London EC1R. near Sadler's Wells. They are in large bound volumes, easy to access).

This is part of the minutes for 24 January, 1884. It shows the price which the site would cost before building could start.

This was the preferred local site. Several other sites for different schools in other parts of London follow in the same minute. They do not concern us here, but indicate how many schools were in the pipeline and how actively the Board was building at that time.

21 February, 1884, Page 599 para 11

The Early History of the School SiteOctober 16, 2011 10:03 AMthworkers' Company

The Clothworkers' Company, which is a very old livery company of the City of London, owned over sixty acres of land in Islington, just south of Essex Road. The Estate included twenty-three acres,October 16, 2011 10:03 AMOctober 16, 2011 10:03 AMOctober 16, 2011 10:03 AMIn the nineteenth century London expanded explosively. Suddenly land which had grown hay, was being sold at building-plot prices. As a result the Clothworkers became very prosperous.

There were complaints that the Company, like other livery companies, was using charity money for its own purposes. Instead of increasing the amount spent on charity, the Company continued to pay the same amount as many years before and pocketed the rest. Dickens was vitriolic about many livery companies dining on turtle soup paid for by charity money. An inquiry found that money had been wrongly spent, so from then on the full charity money was allocated to almshouses and education, as Dame Packington had intended.

This map shows the names of the various Islington Estates

Many houses in this area were only thirty or forty years old in 1884, but this row appears on a map of 1793, so they were already 90 years old in 1883 and perhaps a good deal older. This may be why the Clothworkers decided to sell them. There is mention of a ‘hot wall’ in the surveyor’s report, so one of the chimneys may have been likely to catch fire and this could have been another reason to sell.

The 1793 Map of Islington published by Baker.

The Bakers held a stationers Shop in Islington High Street at this period. Only a very small part of the area had been built up at that time and the New River was open to the skies, wending its peaceful way to the Water Board Head-quarters near Sadler’s Wells.

The Clothworkers’ Estate and Queen’s Head Street imposed on the Baker map.

The 1871 Map of the Area

 St Thomas Street, near the School

This row of houses was built about 1840 and is typical of the period. Small houses on short frontages, with basements. They are tiny copies of the Classical Designs which had been introduced from Italy more than a hundred years earlier. London Stock bricks, perhaps only one brick thick, to save the builder money and allow him to sell them cheaply, and plenty of white painted stucco. Some of these have had rooms built into the roofs later. The original roofs were simple triangular peaks with very short rafters, again to save timber, and covered with Welsh slates. It is possible that the Queen’s Head Street houses were similar to these.

Using the Queen's Head Street Census Returns

The terrace of houses in Queen’s Head Street was to be demolished in order to build the school. Who were the people being cleared out of their homes? How many adults were there and how many children? What were their jobs? How did they earn their livings? Where were they born? How old were they? A writer could build a novel about them on the material which is hidden in the 1881 Census sheets. A pupil could imagine himself or herself to be a child of the same age as one on the census and tell the story of the move. Exciting? Traumatic? Opening up new opportunities, or destroying a magical past?

In The Growth of Marylebone & Paddington I described the building of Oakington Road, Maida Vale, in 1868 and discovered details about the people who first moved into that terrace. I quote what I wrote there:-

From about 1850 the Wheat Belt in the USA spread rapidly northwards and the World became glutted with wheat. It was cheaper to import foreign wheat than to grow it here, so British agriculture collapsed. Thousands of agricultural labourers were thrown out of work and many fled to London. The Paddington and Marylebone area, in West London, area attracted a high proportion of the new arrivals to London from the West Country. They arrived at Paddington on the Great Western Railway, found work in the new shops still being built, and had no reason to penetrate further into London.

The View From Devon

The other end of the story is told in `Devon', part of the New Survey of England, 1954, published by David and Charles. The author, W.G.Hoskins, says:-

He describes the flight from the country during the Nineteenth Century. It was the destruction of a country way of life which had lasted for centuries. Here, in Islington, is a town community being uprooted. What is their story? The 1881 census returns can help in this.

The Queen's Head Street Census Returns

The 1881 Census reveals that 133 people of all ages lived in the 18 houses in Queen's Head Street. (We do not know the numbers of the two houses in St. Thomas's Street which were also demolished, so these have been ignored). In one house were two old people in their seventies. Nearby was a rooming house with ten people in five separate households. Another house had two families with eight children between them, all of school age. No two houses were alike. Of the 133 people in the terrace, 36 were adult males, 44 adult females, and 16 children below the age of 21 and working. There were 25 school children and 19 below school age.

Where did they come from? Three quarters of the people, had been born in London. Some Heads of Households had come from outside. Some had married London girls and had families. In contrast to the Paddington census, of the 33 who had been born outside London, only twelve had come from the West Country. Others had come from Birmingham, Kent and the Eastern Counties. This seems to have been a London community. Some may have already been driven out of the City of London by the intensive rebuilding between 1860 and 1880. If so, they were being moved on again.

The variety of their skills illustrates the wealth of small factories in the. Clerkenwell and Islington area which had developed outside the restricting powers of the City of London and its powerful guilds. There the crafts restricted entry very severely. Outside the City it was easier, so a huge variety of small trades developed just outside the City limits. Many of them highly skilled, as this census shows. In this short terrace were a locksmith with two apprentices, a cotton spinner, a ring case maker, cardboard box makers, a telegraph engineer, a gold chain maker employing his son and a boy, a watch jeweller, some carpenters, a wire twister, a steel spectacle maker, cabinet makers, an ivory turner and other unusual trades. Some, like the watch jeweller, will have done only one small part in the making of the final objects. He, for example, received the two outside plates of a watch movement from the maker. He then placed the drilled jewels on which the wheels would revolve in position in the plates and passed them back to the watchmaker, who completed the watch.

Many of these small specialists may have worked at home in a separate room, or even on the kitchen table. Some teams were The area was full of people who each did their part and passed on the batch each day, or each week, to the next specialist. It was a conveyor belt system dotted round neighbouring streets.

Some specialists would have been parts of a team working in a tiny factory, close packed in narrow benches, with people one liked, or detested but could not get away from. In that case work, which one could not walk away from because one neededthe money on Friday night, could be a torment.

Besides these craftsmen, there were laundresses, nurse maids, clerks and a bookmaker. There were also three teachers, two of whom called themselves Board School Teachers, as if to stress that they were trained teachers and not just people who had drifted in from Dame School work. This was eleven years since the School Boards were set up and had begun training teachers. Clearly the London Board was getting a reputation and the teachers were proud of it.

Link to Intrument Making

The Building of the Queen's Head Board Schools

The Board built two schools in this very narrow site, an Infants School and a Graded School for Boys and Girls. The Infants School building was very small at first.

Queens's Head School Street Schools as they were built in 1884.
Drain Plan ISL 359ABC

Queen's Head Street School for Boys and Girls opened on 25th January 1886 and the Infants' School, at the other end of the site, opened on 21st February 1887.

Details of the Infants School Building

The Infants School building in 1887 from the Drain Plan ISL 359 ABC

The Drain Plan ISL 359ABC shows 1884 site of the Infants School as it was built originally. There were five classrooms and a hall with two windows to trap the maximum sunshine.

Why did the architect choose this very odd layout?

The architect could have designed the building as one oblong block, but space was too valuable for that. Queen's Head Street and Raleigh St. meet at an angle, so an oblong block would have left a triangle of wasted ground along Raleigh Street.

The Problem of Turning the Corner

He built instead two interlocking blocks parallel to the two roads and just far enough away from the roads to allow a passage round them. The position of the north corner controlled everything. This corner was placed at the correct distance from both roads and therefore, because the corners of the classrooms had to be square, the two blocks joined at the joggled break in the Raleigh St. frontage. This join was edged with red bricks and turned into an architectural feature, separating and yet linking the two blocks.

This arrangement gave a thick, wedge-shaped wall between classrooms F and G, which the architect used as space for his chimneys. It also made the other end of classroom H an uneven shape, so the architect squared up that of the room and used the extra space to make three recessed cupboards at the back of the room, each deeper than the next. He saved every inch of space he could.

Diagrams to Show How the Architect used his precious space

Queen's Head Road School infants building had an unusual heating arrangement called ‘Shadracks’

The Reverend Sidney Smith, the witty nineteenth century clergyman, was happily established at St Paul's Cathedral, but in about 1817 his Bishop decided that he should take over a parish in Yorkshire. Instead of dining at every fashionable table in London and keeping them amused with his witticisms, he would be sent to the other end of the country and act as a clergyman. Sydney Smith went, arriving in style in a four-horse carriage, and immediately built for himself a house with big fireplaces.

Fires need a lot of air (oxygen) if they are to burn brightly. The brighter the fire, the more cold air has to rush in through the doors and windows to keep the fire burning. People huddled near the blaze, with their fronts burning and their backs frozen. Smith laid a pipe under the floor to bring in air from the outside to openings just in front of the fire. The draught of the chimney drew in the air directly through the outside wall so that it did not cause draughts in the room. He called the under-floor pipes Shadracks after Meshack, Shadrack and Abendigo, the three holy men in the Bible who walked through the fires of Baal unharmed. Perhaps other old schools may still have traces of Shadracks.

The Graded Boys and Girls School as first built in 1884

Queen's Head Boys and Girls School

North Elevation of the Boys and Girls School Building

The Boys and Girls School (the building at the Rheidol Terrace end of the site) was demolished about 1962, so all we have now are some drawings in the London Metropolitan Archive and the Drain Plans held by Islington Architects Department. It was a two storey building with a pitched roof, a hall facing south west, a long classroom on the south east with tiered seating. This could be divided into three sections by sliding glazed partitions. There were three other classrooms on the north east side.

Drawing No ACI/10, shows a section through two of the roof peaks. The wider room requires extra wooden bracing above, with a king post, a pair of curved diagonal struts and two wooden knees below. (Knees are the curved wooden brackets carved out of natural bends in tree branches). These ones were carved with simple patterns. The rooms are high and neither room has a ceiling.

The Ground Floor classrooms were 18 feet (5.5 metres) high and the Second Floor reached 38 feet (11.6 metres) to the peak. These heights are enormous. The normal ceiling height in modern houses is about 2.6 metres (8 foot 6 inches). Yet theses ceilings are 18 feet and 41 feet up to the ridge of the roof. All this was open space.

Why was it so large? Why did the schools rise so high above the surrounding houses? The schools were only two or three storeys high, yet they dominated four storey houses. The reason was their ceiling height. School ceilings were very much taller than the ceilings of ordinary houses for two good reasons.

Queen's Head Street School, c. 1929

The photograph shows that the desks were arranged in tiers and the back windows started above the teacher's head when she was standing on the top tier. Children were not allowed to move about much. The Activity Method, which called for children to move about, conduct experiments, and work in groups, was years in the future. The classroom floors would have to be levelled before that became possible. Instead, the children worked in their desks and classes had to be dismissed in lines to reduce the danger of falling down the steps. So ceilings had to be high because the floors were tiered.

The second, and far more pressing reason for high ceilings was the danger of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was rife in towns with their pollution and overcrowded houses. It is a very serious disease, affecting mainly the lungs, but it can attack other parts of the body..Almost every family had someone who suffered from the disease, or knew of someone who had died of it. The only known cure was fresh air. A long. slow process of recovery in a mountain resort in Switzerland was the best, but how many could afford that? People had to live where the work was, despite their bad living conditions.

The Graph of Deaths from Tuberculosis

In 1840 there were 4000 deaths per million each year from tuberculosis. Slowly better living conditions had reduced this but, when the tuberculosis bacteria was identified, in the 1880s, there were. still 2000 deaths per million. This was when Queen's Head Street School was opened. The death rate had been halved but the death rate does not tell the whole story. TB makes it difficult for the patient to earn a living. There are long periods of sickness at home, or in hospital. Patients had to be supported by their relations. There was no free health service and no unemployment pay, so one tuberculosis victim could bring distress to the whole family. This was years before the modern drugs which are available today. Paddington Children's Hospital was famous for its care and devotion to children, but the doctors' powers were limited. In 1914, at the start of the First World War, the list of medicines available to treat patients consisted of: Bromide of Potassium, Carbonate of Bismuth, Cod liver oil, Glycerine, and Quinine. They treated Vitamin deficiency diseases with oranges, when the parents could afford them, or with soup made with potato peelings. This was good science, but n its early stages. No others medicines are mentioned in their files.

No wonder children needed fresh air and why it played such a large, part in the conscious planning for child health. In one school in Muswell Hill, where there is fresh air direct from the Urals, there was an wooden, out‑door classroom. It had open spaces instead of a door and windows and the older children worked out there even with snowflakes drifting in."

The Growth of Muswell Hill, by Jack Whitehead, pp.25, 227‑231

Open Air Schools

'The London County Council developed school sites on the outskirts of London, in, for example, Muswell Hill,Shooters Hill and other places where the winds blew free. Classes visited them one day a week by coach to work in open air classrooms, botanise and play games. In town, some schools had open‑air classrooms in the playground, or rather gritty desks in the open, where children could do their lessons in good weather. This emphasis on fresh air and physical exercise which would ensure deep breathing, was the main defence against Tuberculosis.

The Chairman of The School Board for London in 1884 said:-

It was to be another twenty-six years before Queen's s Head School was lucky enough to get one.

Classes too were very large. Sixty children in one classroom could rapidly infect each other, so each child needed plenty of fresh air which was changed regularly. Therefore schools were built with big classrooms and very high ceilings. There were windows on both sides of the classroom, to change the air continually. Medical Officers of Health were perpetually writing about the 'Cross Draught Theory' The fight against tuberculosis was long and slow. Pasteur discovered that heating milk above 70° C killed the tuberculosis bacteria. Eventually milk had to be Pasteurised by law and one of the main sources of infection was controlled. By the end of World War 11, in 1945, the death rate from tuberculosis; was down to 500 per million, one eighth of the 1840 figure. This had been achieved by better nourishment, better housing, pasteurisation, and very high classroom ceilings must also have played some part. Only at this stage was a drug cure found.

By 1950 Streptomycin was widely available and, when BCG vaccination was introduced, the illness was practically eliminated in the west. At last there was a specific cure for tuberculosis and the isolation hospitals, which had housed thousands of sufferers were being closed. Classroom ceilings could be lowered. Compare the ceiling heights of the present 1910 building and the new 1964 ones.

There is a third factor often forgotten in our western world where most people have bathrooms and adequate washing facilities. Many of these children would not have had running water in the house and very few indeed would have had running hot water, so the class rooms could have become very smelly. Another reason for plenty of fresh air.

Thus Tuberculosis, other infectious diseases, coal fires in each classroom, and general ventilation, all affected the design of schools in 1884.

Enlarging the Boys and Girls School in 1892

Changing Trends in School Design

Earlier schools had used the Pupil Teacher System. In this the teacher was assisted by pupils who hoped to qualify later as teachers. They were little older than the oldest children but were responsible for small groups. Their own education continued and the teacher taught them for part of the week, but most of their time was spent supervising younger pupils in sections of a very large classroom. As these Pupil Teachers became qualified, they could have class rooms of their own and this meant changing the school layout. The 1884 London School Board Chairman again:

Earlier schools had used the Pupil Teacher System. In this the teacher was assisted by pupils who hoped to qualify later as teachers. They were little older than the oldest children but were responsible for small groups. Their own education continued and the teacher taught them for part of the week, but most of their time was spent supervising younger pupils in sections of a very large classroom. As these Pupil Teachers became qualified, they could have class rooms of their own and this meant changing the school layout. The 1884 London School Board Chairman again:

Thus at this period we find square classrooms, cross ventilated, lit from the left since most people are right handed, and, where possible, with the classrooms leading directly off a large, sunny hall which faced south.

At Queen's Head Street the long classroom was divided into three permanent rooms, instead of by mere sliding partitions, but there were still interconnecting doors between the rooms.

The 1894-96 Ordnance Survey map shows the two school buildings with the Infants School also enlarged. The St. James St. end of the block is lined with houses and behind their gardens were industrial buildings with entrances from St. James St. and Rheidol Terrace. These were the Builder's Yard which will be discussed later. The Infants School had been enlarged, but still had pitched roofs.

Drawing 1SL 359A, dated 1892, shows the 1884 work in white and the 1892 extension work in black. The extension had a gabled roof identical to those at either end of the 1884 building, but the window arrangement was different. The windows at the other end of the building were blocked in at the same time as part of the redesign of the long classroom. Small windows have been left, presumably these gave cross-draught ventilation. The new brickwork appears as black, as does some new work at the roof level.

The Heating System

When the school was built in 1883-4, each room had a coal fire with its own chimney. Every fire had to be cleared out each day and the ashes removed, the fire re-laid and lit, before the classes arrived. Teachers put on extra coal during the day and the smoke from all these chimneys would have spread over Islington, producing pea-souper fogs. The fogs were thick enough to eat.

Enlarging the Nursery School Building in 1910

The Marching Space

The 'Nursery School' building school was enlarged again in 1910 and a flat roof built on top as a 'Marching Space', exactly as the School Board Chairman had described years before. Playground space had been reduced drastically and the school need for more space, but the houses surrounding the school were densely packed, hemming the school in. There was no way to go but upwards. The steeply pitched roof was removed and a flat one built to provide a 'Marching Space', and playground. This also allowed the architect to improve the school safety by installing fireproof floors.

Many London schools had their floors made fireproof and sililar ‘Marching Spaces’ created at about this time.

Fireproof Floors

The original wooden floors were replaced by steel girders and concrete. From below the new floors can be seen to consist of steel girders with concrete floors above. In most cases the girders are exposed, without ceilings. This steel construction was strong enough to give wide spans, while the lack of a ceiling meant that everything was exposed. There was no place for mice and other vermin to hide.

The floors were constructed as follows:-

I
Section through a new fireproof floor

The plans show the arrangements of the girders on each floor. The ground floor needed them only over the new boiler house but the others cover the complete area.

Construction of the First and Second Floor Fireproof Ceilings
and the Marching Space Above

The walled marching space in 2009 with its safety grilles against the sky.

Install Central Heating

In 1910 it was decided to instal hot-water radiators fired by one boiler, instead of the separate fires in each classroom. Queens Head St slopes downwards with the original Nursery School at the higher end. Therefore the boilerhouse was built at the lower end where less excavation would be necessary.

The Reverend Sidney Smith, the witty nineteenth century clergyman, was happily established at St Paul's Cathedral, but in about 1817 his Bishop decided that he should take over a parish in Yorkshire. Instead of dining at every fashionable table in London and keeping them amused with his witticisms, he would be sent to the other end of the country and act as a clergyman. Sydney Smith went, arriving in style in a four-horse carriage, and immediately built himself a house with big fireplaces.

Fires need a lot of air (oxygen) if they are to burn brightly. The brighter the fire the more cold air has to rush in through the doors and windows to keep the fire burning. People huddled near the blaze, with their fronts burning and their backs frozen. Smith laid a pipe under the floor to bring in air from the outside to openings just in front of the fire. The draught of the chimney drew in the air directly through the outside wall so that it did not cause draughts in the room. He called the underfloor pipes Shasracks after Meshack, Shadrack and Abendigo, the three holy men in the Bible who walked through the fires unharmed. Perhaps other old schools may still have traces of Shadracks.

Revised: October 16, 2011 10:03 AM

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