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Summary

Former location of a group of educational buildings including the secondary school destroyed by a German bomb in 1943, later reused as an infants school

Associated Legal Designations or Protected Status

• Conservation Area: Newbury Town Centre

Monument Type(s):

• SECONDARY SCHOOL? (Edwardian to Second World War - 1909 AD to 1943 AD)
• INFANT SCHOOL? (Mid 20th century to Late 20th century - Present - 1946 AD to 1985 AD)

Full Description

A site to the east of Bartholomew Street and south of Station Road in Newbury has been used for educational purposes since at least the late 19th century, by an array of different establishments with changing names. A school for Girls and Infants is marked on the Newbury Town Plan of 1880-81 <1>. This small rectangular building is aligned parallel to Station Road. The name of this Victorian school is uncertain: the Berkshire Record Office holds log books for Newbury Infants’ Council School, Station Road from 1909 to 1931 and also an architectural drawing of 1931-1932 <2>. This building had been extended or rebuilt at the start of the 20th century but by the 3rd Epoch OS mapping another much larger school had been constructed further east at right angles to Station Road <3>.

West Berkshire Museum has photographs showing the ceremony at the opening of this bigger building on 10/03/1909 <4>, assumed to be a secondary school. However one image is labelled as the new Council Schools, implying more than one establishment on the site. Possibly the Infants School was also remodelled at the same time. An aerial photograph from 1937 shows the two school buildings from the south <5> and they are quite similar in appearance. Both are two storey blocks with rows of large sash windows along each side. They have steep hipped rooves, although the larger school has a more complex double set with flat roofing in between, and also a white turret, presumably housing a bell.

At the Berkshire Record Office <6> are admission registers from 1909-1950, log books from 1909-1970 and punishment books from 1922-1947 that relate to the Newbury Senior Council, or Girls’ Council School, and some of these documents relate to this site.

The Newbury Senior Council school was one of several buildings in the town hit by bombs dropped from a German plane in February 1943 <7><8><9>. This attack killed several pupils and staff in the school as well as people in the nearby St Bartholomew's almshouses, and demolished St John's church. After the bombing, girls who had been at the Council School were moved to the Elizabethan mansion of Shaw House, which had been requisitioned during the war and then became a school for over 40 years.

The damaged building seems likely to have been cleared from the site, although a 1952 aerial photograph shows a single storey flat roofed structure present <10>. This L-shaped building is marked on the 5th Epoch OS mapping of 1967 <11> as a community centre. However a Newbury Weekly News article and photograph <12> suggest that the single storey remnants of the Senior School were repurposed after the War as Eastfields County Infant School, which was closed, merged with St John’s Church of England Infant School and relocated in 1985 <14>. The Berkshire Record Office holds admissions records and log books for Eastfields County Infant School from 1946 to 1985 <2>. The area of Eastfields has loosely been used to describe that part of Newbury to the east of Bartholomew Street, and more specifically to the east of Newtown Road. It is believed that before 1946, the site of Eastfield Infants School was also used for an evacuated LCC primary school called Bentworth Road Council School during the Second World War.

A new school was subsequently built at this site in the late 20th century (St Nicolas' Junior School), but not on the same footprint. Both earlier school buildings on the site were completely removed when the new school opened, but a brief history of St Nicolas' school <13> indicates that it had formerly used one known as 'the Annexe' from after the Second World War as overspill from their Enborne Road site. It therefore seems probable that this would have been the western two storey block on Station Road.

Sources and further reading

Related Monuments

Associated Excavations and Fieldwork

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