Victorian Schools

In 1870 Gladstone’s Liberal government passed the Elementary Education Act, which promised a standardised system of education. The Act initiated a nationwide programme of school-building that was to be administered by parochial or municipal School Boards.

The School Boards were charged with an important social mission and it was soon recognised that a consistent architectural strategy based on sound principles was required. Edward Robert Robson (1835-1917) was appointed architect and surveyor to the London School Board in 1871 and he began to formulate a more rigorous approach. Robson conducted a study of schools on the Continent and in the USA, and his findings were published as School Architecture (1874), a book that was highly influential. Robson’s principles shaped the official policy of the London School Board, which built 289 schools between 1870 and 1884. His main contribution was to establish ‘Queen Anne’ as the semi-official style of the School Boards.

Ostensibly, the Queen Anne style was based on the architecture produced during the reign of Queen Anne (1701-1714). In practice, it was an eclectic style incorporating Classical, Flemish and French Renaissance influences. Queen Anne gained support as the Gothic Revival declined in popularity during the 1870 and 80s. The younger generation of architects reacted against the strictures of Gothic and ‘defected’ to Queen Anne, which combined freely-treated Classical details with the adaptability of Gothic planning. Sir George Gilbert Scott, the venerable Gothic Revivalist, called Queen Anne a ‘vexacious disturber of the Gothic movement,’ but many of the pioneers of Queen Anne emerged from within Scott’s office. J.J. Stevenson, for example, codified the shift with his essay ‘On the Recent Re-action of Taste’ (1874), and subsequently published House Architecture (1880), an unusually temperate architectural manifesto that proclaimed the merits of the style. He signalled this transition with the Red House in Bayswater, an exemplary Queen Anne house designed for his own occupation (1871). G.F. Bodley and Thomas Garner designed the London School Board offices on the Embankment (1873) in a rich Queen Anne style. Foremost among the Scott alumni was Robson, who established Queen Anne as the style of the Victorian School Boards, thanks to his pioneering designs and extensive publications.

Robson’s approach illuminates the controversy surrounding the Gothic and Queen Anne styles. Beginning from the conviction that, ‘A Board School should look like a Board School and like nothing else,’ Robson felt it was imperative that the new schools could be clearly distinguished from the voluntary and private schools that preceded the Elementary Education Act: