The suggestion that the British public school system retains the best of Western civilisation is becoming harder to defend thanks to its continued insistence on throwing up frightful new school buildings. Though inheritors of often soul-enhancing buildings, current headteachers seem to be outcompeting each other in who can best uglify their school estate.
An example from my hood: St Swithin’s Girl’s School on the outskirts of Winchester. The main school is housed in 1930s well-proportioned brick building designed by Messrs Mitchell and Bridgwater.
A junior school was added in the early 2010s and has a distinct open prison vibe. (The Architects Walters and Cohen are the guilty men.)
Currently being built is an enormous Sports Centre. Now in competition with Winchester College, which now takes girls for the Sixth Form, a sports centre is required to up the offer. A pity then that it resembles a Home Bargains warehouse, replete with plastic roof.
In anticipation of the girl boarders, Winchester College has got in on the act of Building Back Ugly.
Its new Boarding House resembles a cross between an upmarket Premier Inn and a 1960s shopping precinct.
Harrow similarly has recently opened a new Science Block that gives the Kremlin a run for its money in terms of soul-destroying vibes.
My father-in-law lives in Oundle and a recent visit told the same story: mellow old buildings spoiled by hollow-windowed rectangular blocks.
Even poor old Eton College is not immune from the Travelodgification of its school estate. The architects Gilbert Ash, responsible for the Soviet-style St.Paul’s Prep School and aforementioned WinCol boarding house, are demolishing some of Eton’s building and erecting a new sports centre #derivativemodernisttrash.
My children and I have only known modernist cube block state school buildings, but I expect I would be rather annoyed if I was paying £50,000-plus a year for my children to be educated in similar buildings. I’m currently on the university open day trail and the story is alike all over the place: Stalag B style accommodation blocks, 1960s new universities already in a state of grubby decay and Architecture Schools the absolute worst of all of them. Again, as we might be contributing to the accommodation fees, I’m feeling rather picky about sending my offspring off to some soul-wilting modernist hellscape.
The beauty of our education landscape matters. I have a rather old-fashioned notion that architecture needs to be more than functional and fulfilling of the sustainability requirements. We ought to be inspiring the next generation with lofty concepts of beauty and truth and goodness, not encouraging them to look at the render on the Science Block and wonder why it’s already dripping with dried slime. Talking to one of my son’s friends who’s moved from a Brutalist built state school to Bristol University to study Palaeontology, the first thing he said was: “The buildings are so beautiful, it’s like studying in a Cathedral, I love it.”
Who is to blame for this devastating visual decline in our educational architecture? Can we still finger the awful Bauhaus Movement and the general triumph of socialist utilitarian design movements over historic efforts to reproduce heaven, or the Classical Age, on earth? Is it the fault of concrete and Computer Aided Design? Or the Tories for sacking Sir Roger Scruton from his unpaid role as chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission? Perhaps it’s former Housing Ministe, Angela Rayner’s fault for saying, “Beauty means nothing really.”
(Incidentally – cost is not an excuse. All of the aforementioned private school building projects cost millions – they are just miserably designed.)
While I don’t normally suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, I do however maintain he is tangentially responsible. His executive order on the subject of beautiful architecture sensibly reads:
Applicable Federal public buildings should uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States,and command respect from the general public. They should also be visually identifiable as civic buildings and, as appropriate, respect regional architectural heritage. Architecture — particularly traditional and classical architecture — that meets the criteria set forth in this subsection is the preferred architecture for applicable Federal public buildings.
Alas when Trump unveiled the design for his new Triumphal Arch, he sounded the death-knell for Neo-Classical architecture around the world. What architect would want to be associated with such a fascist/lunatic/warmonger adjacent design movement?
Sadly therefore, architects terrified by the association of Trump with classical design will continue to refuse to design beautifully. This then leaves only those commissioning buildings to have any hope of turning the page of pastiche modernism. So please, headteachers – of both state and the private sector: please remember the words of John Ruskin and commission beautiful school buildings:
When we build… let it not be for present delights nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think… that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour, and the wrought substance of them, See! This our fathers did for us!
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
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Simple question – which buildings would you get the camera out for? When it comes to depressing post was building then I can assure you the place to go is Magdeburg in East Germany. Maybe they have built something worth looking at but on my visit in the early 2000s it was just a mass of dreadful Soviet buildings to replace the handiwork of ourselves and the Americans. By contrast, there were pictures of the centre of Lubeck after the war with every building roofless but they rebuilt it and it is a beautifully restored city centre.
I taught in a Sixth Form College with rather attractive 1930s neoclassical buildings at the time when the government’s ‘building schools for the future’ was happening. The go-ahead principal submitted proposals to knock the whole college down and rebuild in a soulless early 2000s style. His justification was twofold: 1. The buildings will be ‘greener’ saving lots of energy and carbon and stuff, and (2) The buildings look too old-fashioned. Does it look like an educational environment for the 21st century? Both ridiculous arguments, but they gave him permission and it would have happened if the scheme hadn’t run out of money. The college is still there…
Evidently following the market in a similar fashion to the public sector. At least those mentioned do not seem to be using temporary structures, such as portakabins (sic), which the primary I attended in the 1960s did, to meet the demand of an expanding area. Seems to be common practice by various local authorities now, as well.
Looking on the bright side, maybe some of those buildings will have to be scrapped, if they have used some cheap and nasty material. Some of that has happened on the other side, anyway, if you look up the RAAC concrete technique. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/call-for-public-inquiry-into-handling-of-raac-crisis-16-04-2026/
Really, DS, with everything else going on, this is what you’ve got? I’ll confess, I haven’t read the article, because it’s so fatuous. Throughout history, people have complained about the latest fad in architecture.
😆🎯 Same. Mind, I don’t find articles on heat pumps or solar panels terribly interesting either, but to each their own.😴
No harm in something different – plenty of room for all sorts of articles is my opinion…
Thank you, Joanna. I agree.
You made your point by showing noble old buildings. There do exist examples of modern buildings that are not ugly and utilitarian in appearance, but of course you did not have space to show them as well, and they are the exceptions rather than the rule.
Modern architecture has been slated numerously, but styles have changed since the era in which the core college buildings were erected. We probably could still build Gothic palaces, but the cost would be insane, not to mention the impracticability of doing so. The trade of stonemason is not what it was. Add to the equation the requirements for buildings to be efficient and “sustainable”, and you have the reason for these flat-roofed characterless boxes.
Interested to hear robust rebuttals.
You are likely spot on with the energy efficiency and other building control rules effectively stopping or hindering more impressive design, and that’s before the accountants get to it…
First of all, most of those new buildings don’t look that bad. Even the first picture, which is the worst.
Most buildings will have significant elements of standardisation or prefab components. This keeps them cheap. There are other things such as lower ceilings which keep buildings cheaper to produce than they were (less materials/one more floor). If we want more beautiful buildings then it needs to be addressed at the root. Maybe lower VAT for buildings built in a more beautiful (Georgian/Victorian) style.
Or maybe it’s not such a huge deal.
“Maybe beauty isn’t such a huge deal.” I suppose, then, that leaving aside all questions of local crime rates, employment opportunities and so forth, you would be as happy living in Slough as you would in Bourton-on-the-Water? Croydon would be just as nice as Cadogan Square?
I may tell you, as a resident of Croydon (not the town itself, but the wider borough), that if it hadn’t been waging war against beauty for the last seventy years, I would be a lot happier in my day-to-day life. Whenever I am standing on the platforms at East Croydon station, I cannot repress the thought that “Here, there is no beautiful thing.” Are you not able to conceive how miserable that makes life for people who have to put up with it on a daily basis with little opportunity to escape?
I am fortunate that I can still remember what it was like to be a child. Between 2009 and 2016, I attended a state grammar school founded in 1571. I have no idea what became of the original buildings, but for most of the 20th century it occupied a reasonably impressive Victorian redbrick edifice, but in 1968 it moved to a… Read more »
If the young people I get to speak to are anything to go by, they prefer modern designs and don’t find old buildings all that beautiful.
But I do think that it is a reflection of modern times, where function seems to be much more important than aesthetics.
Well, actually, the most important thing is projecting whatever warped idea is currently passing for virtue, then function, then aesthetics.
I’m not sure many people of any age would be conscious of finding buildings of any kind “beautiful” – or anything else for that matter. But I do think that being surrounded by something that has been done well, with care and thought and effort, has a positive effect on people, whether they realise it or not.
It’s good to have an article on something different I think.
Unfortunately, in my experience, the corporate world is run by accountants, who could often be said to know the cost of everything, but not the value. Victorian building was probably a high point, especially some industrial plant like water treatment works.
Sadly those days are gone, and square boxes, using flat sheets of insulation and roof panels etc rule the roost. I did like the term ‘Travelodgification’ used…
There is no VAT on new builds