Building record 1540700000 - Elangeni School. Woodside Avenue

History:
School building was both a symbolic aspiration of post-war Britain and an urgent need, driven by the ‘baby boom’, the raising of the school leaving age, planned new towns and estates and the reconstruction of bomb-damaged buildings. Programmes of new schools were coordinated and designed by local education authorities with loans and oversight from central government. Demand was met by prefabricated ‘kits of parts’, either sponsored by public authorities or developed privately. Elsewhere, where bricks and bricklayers were readily available, like in Buckinghamshire, traditional techniques were adapted to incorporate large windows and flat roofs. Collaboration between architects and educationists could result in expressive plans which facilitated patterns of learning and movement. The requirement for abundant daylight and outdoor access led to dispersed layouts, a trend which was countered by tight cost limits and constrained sites. In the best examples child-scaled proportions, landscaping, bright colour schemes or works of art combined to create a distinctive visual aesthetic.
The 1944 Education Act divided schooling into primary and secondary stages with a break at age 11. Some authorities provided separate infant and junior schools with a break at age 7 plus; others provided primary schools for the 5-11 age range. School sizes likewise varied from two-class village schools to primaries of 480 pupils. Informal, ‘child-centred’ learning through first-hand experience, advocated in the influential Plowden report of 1967, was encouraged by the provision of special areas for quiet and messy work and more open layouts. At Buckinghamshire and Hampshire a mix of enclosed class bases and shared space was provided, allowing teachers to strike their own balance between varied groups and activities and traditional whole-class teaching.
In Buckinghamshire, the County Architect Fred Pooley favoured a ‘rationalised traditional’ construction as an alternative to prefabrication. He believed schools could be constructed durably and economically by exploiting traditional local crafts and industries: the brickworks, tileries, joiners and small but skilled firm of builders. Pooley claimed that using hand-made bricks added only one percent to the cost of a building, whilst adding richness and durability to exteriors. School’s planning modules were based on brick dimensions, and high standards were specified, resulting in many square meters being rebuilt.
Woodside School, Amersham (listed Grade II), is said to have marked a sea change in Buckinghamshire
schools design. Built 1956-1957 to designs by Ministry of Education architect David Medd, so popular was it with the county that it formed the basis for the design of a number of other schools; Elangeni, and neighbouring Chestnut Lane are relatively early iterations. Primary school planning began to be based around a series of specialised spaces varying according to group age, size and activity, with areas for messy practical work, crafts, arts, basic science. Pooley’s team boiled these down to a basic planning unit of paired classrooms with small practical and quiet areas, with attached cloakrooms and WCs. Schools were then planned from different configurations of these elements, speeding up the process of design without resorting to predetermined models.
Elangeni Middle School was designed in 1970 and completed in 1973. It was built as a second phase of
junior school provision for the expanding suburb of Amersham on the Hill. Chestnut Lane School, adjacent, was completed in 1969 and initially catered for children from five until 12, though as demand increased, Elangeni was built to serve the older juniors, and Chestnut Lane became a first school. Both stand in the wooded grounds of a former Victorian villa.
Elangeni is a further refinement of the paired classrooms model, with the addition of a shared quiet room, now used as a teacher’s room. Three teaching wings are wrapped around grassed playgrounds and connect with a central library, hall and dining area. Craft, science, maths and music areas occupy the
irregularly-shaped leftover spaces. The result is a complex plan with much external walling at unusual angles. Some enclosure of external walkways has occurred. A pupil referral centre, in the same idiom, was added later.
Details:
Middle school, designed 1970, completed 1973.
ARCHITECT: Buckinghamshire County Council Architects’ Department led by Fred Pooley, job architect Tony Kirby.
MATERIALS: handmade brown brick laid in Flemish bond, with timber weatherboarding, timber window
frames, and concrete tiled roofs.
PLAN: the school stands in the former grounds of a villa. It has a complex, irregular plan consisting of three principal wings leading from a central block. Entrance is from the north, into a central corridor adjoining which are staff offices, the library, WCs, and the dining and assembly halls. Three classroom wings project at varied angles, and woodwork, art, music and science rooms occupy the areas in between.
EXTERIOR: the school is single storeyed throughout and is characterised by low rooflines with
shallowly-pitched roofs, with steeply-pitched glazed lanterns rising from the ridge above each classroom. The dining and assembly halls are great, monopitched masses which face each other at an angle and rise above the lower classroom wings. Elevations are staggered and angled with recessed sections providing external entrances into the individual classrooms; most doors are half glazed. Fenestration is within timber frames with concrete cills, painted red, and varies in form according to its position on the elevation; there are large square lights with narrow tilting casements above to the classrooms, offices and halls, narrow strip windows to cloakrooms, and full-height glazed returns to the projecting quiet rooms. Some classrooms have wide, half-glazed sliding doors, no longer operational. The dining and assembly halls have weatherboarding beneath the ridge of the roof, and clerestory lighting below.
INTERIOR: classroom interiors, generally, have painted brick walls and ceilings of acoustic panelling and
matchboarding. They are open to the pitched roof, with a long narrow opening to the lantern, lined with matchboarding. Each classroom has a timber rail at head height running the perimeter of the room and concealing strip lighting.
The halls are lined in buff brick internally and are open to the monopitched roofs, which are ceiled with
acoustic panelling. Floors are laid with herringbone parquet.
The entrance lobby is accessed through full-height glazed double doors and has a row of narrow vaulted roof lights. The walls, along with those to the staff rooms and offices, are plastered. Circulation corridors and some offices have matchboarded sloping ceilings.
Selected Sources:
Books and journals
Harwood, E, England’s Schools: History, Architecture and Adaptation , (2010).
Saint, A, Towards a Social Architecture: The Role of School-Building in Post-War, (1987).
Other
Buckinghamshire County Council, 1977, Buckinghamshire: 25 Years of Architecture.
Franklin, Geraint, with Harwood, Elain, Taylor, Simon & Whitfield, Matthew, Research Report Series
no.33-2012. England’s Schools 1962-88. A Thematic Survey (2012).
Elangeni School is not recommended for listing for the following principal reasons:
- Architectural interest: the planning, style, and materials are derived from Woodside School, Amersham, and key architectural characteristics are exhibited in earlier school buildings;
- Alteration: the enclosure of the entrance ways has affected the staggered external elevations and the
internal plan;
- Historic interest: lacking significant innovation in its design, and not a key building in the development
of Buckinghamshire County Schools nor reflective of progression in pedagogic theory (B1).