Marion Richardson Primary School

Reasons for Designation

Marion Richardson Primary School, formerly Senrab Street School, is designated at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * an unusually rich composition, drawing on a variety of fashionable motifs associated with the Edwardian Baroque Revival; * good quality craftsmanship and materials, including plentiful stone dressings; * one of the larger East End board schools, which represents the culmination of the SBL and LCC's ambitious school building programme; * a grand, monumental school which contrasts with its setting amid Victorian terraced houses and post-war housing.

Details

788/0/10268 SENRAB STREET 11-DEC-09 Marion Richardson Primary School

GV II School, 1907, by TJ Bailey for the London County Council. Minor later alterations including an extension to W front of c1970 which lacks special interest.

EXTERIOR: Edwardian Baroque style with red brick elevations, stone dressings, copings and pediments, brick and stone chimneys, and pitched roofs of tile curbed by parapets. The turrets on the west front have copper domes. The regular fenestration comprises white-painted wooden windows, some the originals, some sensitive replacements. The west front with three storeys of halls with a pitched roof in the centre, flanked by square towers with circular turrets, then by links with pilasters rising to segment-headed gables, and ending in plainer wings with stone quoins at the corners. There is a low addition of c1970 projecting to the right of the centre. The east front (towards Head Street) is arranged with windows in groups of three and has slightly projecting bays to the left and right of the centre, these with stone pediments (carrying the initials LCC) and banded quoins. The short north and south fronts have pairs of pediments at roof level, each bearing the date '1907' and further banded quoins; the north front (towards Senrab Street) has a cartouche reading 'LCC / 1907'. Three of the original entrances, with their inscribed lintels, steps, and iron railings, survive. The c1970 block, not of special interest, has resulted in the removal of one girls/infants entrance.

INTERIOR: The standard plan comprising a central hall, with a bank of classrooms down one side, and corridors leading to clusters of classrooms in the wings, is readable on each of the three-storeys. There are mezzanines between the floors overlooking the corridors; these were the former staff and head-teacher's rooms. In the attic are former drawing classrooms and science rooms which retain their timber roof trusses, albeit partly concealed by a later suspended ceiling. There are hardwood block floors, glazed brick dados (mostly painted), and semi-circular glazed fanlights and internal windows in most corridors and classrooms; the upper floor corridors have skylights. There are four stairwells, each with russet glazed brick walls, metal balustrades to the upper flights and hardwood handrails lower down; the glazed brick in all but the upper sections of one of the stairs has been painted over. There is a single fireplace surviving in one of the former staffrooms.

HISTORY: Marion Richardson Primary School was originally called Senrab Street School after the street that runs near its northern boundary. The school, located in Stepney, served the area's predominantly Jewish population; the children of dock workers and those employed in the rag trade, among other occupations. It originally took 856 children, comprising 308 infants on the ground floor, 274 girls on the first, and 274 boys on the top floor.

TJ Bailey had been architect to the School Board for London before it was dismantled in 1902, and responsibility for educating London's children passed to the London County Council. Such was the achievement of the London School Board in the last quarter of the C19, that by the Edwardian period few neighbourhoods in London were without a red brick, Queen Anne style, three-storey school designed by Bailey or ER Robson, his predecessor. Under the LCC, until around 1910 at least, schools continued to be built in a similar style and materials as under the School Board.

The pioneering Elementary Education Act of 1870, steered through Parliament by William Forster and thus known as 'Forster's Act', was the first to establish a national, secular, non-charitable provision for the education of children aged 5-13. A driving force behind the new legislation was the need for a literate and numerate workforce to ensure that Britain remained at the forefront of manufacture and commerce. Moreover, the extension of the franchise to the urban working classes in the 1867 Reform Act also alerted politicians to the need to, in words attributed to the then Chancellor, 'educate our masters'. The Act required partially state-funded elementary schools to be established in areas where existing provision was inadequate, to be managed by elected school boards. Around 500 board schools were built in London, many in densely-populated, poor areas where they were (and often remain) the most striking buildings in their locales; further schools were built under the LCC. The Board did not escape criticism, however, both on the grounds of expense to rate-payers and for potentially radicalising the urban poor through secular education and it was the former which led to its being taken over by the LCC in 1902. Yet the supporters of London's new school buildings were unapologetic, as the words of Charles Booth, justifying the expense of more elaborate schools in the East End, indicate: 'It was necessary to strike the eye and hold the imagination. It was worth much to carry high the flag of education, and this is what has been done. Each school stands up from its playground like a church in God's acre, ringing its bell'. Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Naval Treaty' (1894) also lauded the new metropolitan landmarks as 'Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future', thus epitomising the reformers' confidence in the power of universal education to transform society. The striking design of many of these schools is illustrative of this special history.

SOURCES SAVE Britain's Heritage, Beacons of Learning (1995) Elain Harwood and Andrew Saint 'Report on Listing of London Board Schools' held at NMR (1991) Timothy Walder, 'The evolution of the classic school design of the School Board for London (1870-1904): a reassessment of the role of Edward Robert Robson' (Institute of Education, University of London MA dissertation, 2006) James Hall, 'The London Board Schools 1870-1904: Securing a Future for these Beacons of the Past' (University of Bath MSc. dissertation 2006-7)

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: Marion Richardson Primary School, formerly Senrab Street School, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * an unusually rich composition, drawing on a variety of fashionable motifs associated with the Edwardian Baroque Revival; * good quality craftsmanship and materials, including plentiful stone dressings; * one of the larger East End board schools, which represents the culmination of the SBL and LCC's ambitious school building programme; * a grand, monumental school which contrasts with its setting amid Victorian terraced houses and post-war housing.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

507057

Legacy System:

LBS

Sources

Books and journals
Hall, J, The London Board Schools 1870-1904: Securing a Future for the Beacons of the Past, (2006-7)
Walder, T, The Evolution of the Classic School Design of the School Board of London (1870-1904), (2006)
Save Britains Heritage in Beacons of Learning, (1995)

End of official list entry

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