In the immediate post war period the county of Hertfordshire faced a drastic lack of schools. The county had been designated 5 new town areas, (Hatfield, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage, Letchworth GC & Welwyn GC), that were to be populated largely by those dispossessed by the bombing of London. Thousands of children would need school places in these new towns and all over the county. The newly formed architects department (the county didn't have one until 1945) was lead by chief architect Charles Herbert Aslin and his deputy Stirrat Johnson-Marshall. Both had prewar experience at municipal level, Aslin as Borough Architect for Derby and Johnson-Marshall with Willesden UDC. A lack of funds and need to build schools quickly led them to consider new building methods. The one they used was the Hills 8’ 3”prefab system. This system, developed by Hills & Co of West Bromwich, allowed prefabricated sections to be attached to a standardised steel frame. This way, windows, doors, and walls could be factory made and assembled on site, halving the man hours needed to build a school. Despite its set proportions, the system was flexible enough to allow different designs to be created within the system. This allowed the department to design schools that fit into their environments and responded to the needs of each school. Johnson-Marshall recruited a team of young architects for the department, with the likes of David & Mary Medd, Bruce Martin, Oliver Cox, AW Cleeve Barr, Leonard Manasseh and Richard Sheppard among others, designing for the county. These designers looked with fresh eyes at not just the buildings there were creating, but at all the accessories of educational life. The design of desks, chairs, playgrounds and more were rethought in terms of the children's needs rather than be created from traditional forms. Artwork in the schools was also a big feature in HCC post war schools. The county’s chief Education Officer John Newsom was a strong believer that an environment filled with artworks would be beneficial for a child's education. Artists like Henry Moore,Julian Trevelyan, Mary Fedden and Malcolm Hughes all contributed works to schools as part of the Art for All programme that Newsom instigated. The first school completed was The Burleigh Primary School in Cheshunt, with construction starting 1946 and the first buildings completed a year later, shortly followed by the village school at Essendon the same year. The Bruce Martin designed Morgan Road JMI in Hertford opened in 1949, and Aboyne Lodge in St Albans by Donald Barron in 1950. These buildings became the standard bearers for Herts new prefab system, visited widely by architects, bureaucrats and journalists from all over Britain, Europe and the wider world. Templewood school in the Pentley Park area of Welwyn Garden City opened in 1950. Designed by Cleeve Barr and featuring murals by Pat Trew, Templewood also became one of Herts flagship buildings, admired by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who reportedly said “c’est jolie” of it. The building of schools was rapid, with first 100 post war schools in the county opened in January 1955, and another 100 opened by 1961. To help maintain this rate of output private firms were asked to produced designs. Yorke, Mardall & Rosenberg designed The Barclay School in Stevenage (1949), Richard Sheppard & Partners designed many, including Broxbourne Secondary Modern (1959) and Harrison & Seel produced schools in Hemel Hempstead and Baldock (1954). Johnson-Marshall left to become Chief Architect to the Ministry of Education in 1948, and the Medd’s followed a year later. Oliver Cox and AW Cleeve Bar also left to work for the London County Council Architects Department. Floor plans of various Herts schools. 1. Monkfrith Infants School, East Barnet ; 2. Cowley Hill School, Borehamwood ; 3. Belswains School, Hemel Hempstead ; 4. Morgans Walk School, St Albans ; 5. Aboyne Logde Infants School, St Albans ; 6. Spencer School, St Albans ; 7. Warren Dell School, Watford ; 8. Templewood School, Welwyn Garden City. Image from histoire-education.revues.org CG Fardell replaced Aslin as chief architect for the county in 1959, carrying on the school building programme, and introduced more variation in texture and colour for the prefabricated panels used. The department also expanded the scale of the campuses they were designing. Moving on from the smaller Primary, Infant and Junior schools, Herts started building more Secondary schools and Technical colleges. John Wakley designed the St Albans College of Further Education with five buildings spread over grounds off Hatfield Road. The first wave of building took from 1958-60, with further building between 1965-6. The design won a RIBA Bronze Medal in 1960. Ian Nairn was effusive in his praise for the building. He called it “an exceptional building” and “a purely British achievement and one that can stand comparison with the very best that has been done abroad”. The department also produced Dacorum College, in a similar spread out design as at St Albans, by John Bolton in 1962. Other architects continued to produce work for the county, with Oliver Carey designing junior schools in Tring and Wheathampstead, Stirling & Margaret Craig in Stevenage and Harpenden, and Crabtree and Jarosz designed primary schools in Welwyn GC and Dane End. The Hertfordshire school building programme not only delivered hundreds of schools for thousands of children throughout the county in the austere post war years, but also influenced architecture at home and abroad for many years. The CLASP (Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme), developed in 1957 by Aslin, brought together local authorities from all over the country to develop a prefab system that could be used to build schools up to four storeys tall. The department was also a proving ground for young architects, who joined fresh from university and then moved onto to the LCC, Ministry of Education or other local authorities. The Hertfordshire influence was also felt in private practice with firms like Twist & Whitely, Green, Lloyd & Adams and Barron & Smith being made up of Hertfordshire graduates. The HCC’s real legacy is of course the schools and colleges they built. Eight of them are now listed and the majority still in use, providing places to learn and explore for the children of Hertfordshire.
1 Comment
|
AuthorExploring modernism in the garden cities and new towns of Hertfordshire. Archives
March 2020
Categories |