New Building Systems

 The recent blog post Post-war Primaries provided insight into the startling contrasts in architectural and building styles between our schools from pre-war days and those which came to blossom in our communities from the 1950s onwards.  In this final post of the series about our schools here is a more extended portrait of the Hertfordshire Surveyor's Office response to providing school buildings in the period after the excellent brick structures of the thirties, with their nod to Georgian and classical styles.  It was in this period that the County Architect's Department was conceived, and it was in 1940 that John Newsom (later Sir John, whose seminal report Half Our Future was published in 1963) was appointed as the County Education Officer.  He and Henry Morris, Newsom's equivalent in Cambridgeshire, developed radical views for the time on how how children might in the future be educated.  Key to that was to be the environment in which the learning would be carried out.

As Andrew Saint's brief overview Not Buildings But a Method of Building states "If you take seriously the philosophy that good architecture is not so much about appearances as about enabling people to live fuller, richer lives, then there are only a few kinds of buildings in which you have the opportunity to try it out in detail."

The skeleton of an 8 feet 3 inch building.
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

By far the majority of schools which would be required after the war would be primaries, and such schools would be ideal trialling grounds.  But the demands on resources would be considerable.  In addition to the normal buildings requirement for a county of Hertfordshire's size, the government's post-war New Towns strategy would place four such towns – Stevenage, Hemel Hempstead, Hatfield and Welwyn Garden City extension – inside Hertfordshire's boundaries and which would be developed concurrently.  Such an intense commitment required up to ten school sites to be commissioned each year once the building programme had been geared up.

"The School in the Orchard:" Aboyne Lodge Infants School, 1950.
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

 Among the building materials in short supply were bricks, and in order to shorten the completion time for each project at whatever time of year more reliance would have been required on units of the structure made in factories ready to assemble on site.  So a system evolved based on standardised module kits based on 8 feet 3 inches.  Though successful as a learning tool for the architects – and maintaining consistency in project costs – subsequent modules were made based, first on 3 feet 4 inches, and then 2 feet 8 inches.  Increasingly, therefore, more flexibility was available while using the same units of construction.  Classrooms, which at one time had been boxed off cuboids linked by corridors; the latter were specifically walking routes between the classrooms though not well utilised at times other than peak movement ("between lessons").  Corridors  were widened and became shared spaces with nearby learning areas. 

Light and airy classroom, Aboyne Lodge Infants School 1950
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

We are all familiar with modern schools having large window walls to allow light to flood into rooms and provide vistas towards outside planted green spaces; courtyards and other external spaces for classroom extensions were introduced.  The post-war schools were not part of a fixed plan, but a developing vision resulting from architects, teachers and educationalists jointly learning to make optimal uses of the emerging structural technologies.  Of course, walls of windows required sun shielding methods – endless horizontal blind systems needing frequent repair; those steel V beams across rooms at ceiling height which were major dust collectors, as were the heating cabinets which drew in cool air at ground level and spewed it out again at head height, also requiring maintenance inside the cabinets for dust removal and occasional replacement of fan motors; the plasterboard mouldings surrounding the steel pillars every eight feet or so which, accidentally or not, were easily kicked.  Tungsten lighting was gradually replaced by fluorescent tubes and false ceilings became the later norm, hiding the V beams (and those dust ledges) and provided useful service ducts and a modicum of insulation.

Adaptable and interchangeable space in a typical 1960s primary school.
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

Insulation, of course, remained an issue in the years of single pane glazing and metal panelling, dozens of access doors which often  remained open after use, mostly led straight into rooms or corridors without an intervening air-lock space.  Heated by oil for the most part until gradual conversion to gas, the buildings were inevitably expensive to heat, and the mainly flat roofs required attention after fifteen years or so.  But such were the inevitable downsides of brave attempts to introduce what some have termed kit schools.  As the methodology has matured and was adapted to larger secondary schools and colleges, today's educational buildings are a world away from their 1950s beginners.  They are also far more expensive as the benefits of scale building programmes were lost following the first two decades post-war.  Those early buildings have become far more resilient than predicted at the time: a school opened in 1960, for example might have been expected to serve a minimum of 25 to 30 years but are still flourishing more than sixty years later.  School population fluctuations in the past 40 years have been largely managed by either fixed extensions, portable classrooms (as in Terrapin or Trafalgar types) or by closing one building and amalgamating with a nearby school.

Today's building requirements need to achieve the same flexibility of internal space as Hertfordshire's pioneer teams specified, while returning to greater use of more traditional external materials such as brick.

One further feature of those early post-war schools which some of us will recall are the extensive use of bright wall colours, and specially commissioned curtaining materials, usually in the halls.  Sometimes controversially, commissioned murals occupied external walls instead of bland concrete, and – usually at secondary schools – the purchase of items of sculpture to inspire.

Hertfordshire module system adapted for St Albans College of Further
Education in Hatfield Road 1959.
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

As the early Hertfordshire model became more widely known other authorities took notice and adopted the same or similar concepts, including widely in London, which of course, would benefit from systems building, given the amount of war-time damage and freshly designed residential neighbourhoods.  Hertfordshire was in the vanguard of school building design and the young architects from its department spread their wings and influenced the approaches to school building in the counties in which they were subsequently employed.

In the east end of St Albans we have a representative collection of schools built in the Newsom era and the decade following.  Reflecting on Andrew Saint's quote from above:

"If you take seriously the philosophy that good architecture is not so much about appearances as about enabling people to live fuller, richer lives, then there are only a few kinds of buildings in which you have the opportunity to try it out in detail."