Woodberry Down's history

Woodberry Down Infant and Junior Schools opened their doors in 1950 and, just over 50 years later, amalgamated to form Woodberry Down Community Primary School.

The schools opened in 1950 to teach the children who lived on the newly built Woodberry Down estate. Work on building the estate started in August 1946. The eight-storey blocks were built first, Needwood and Nicholl and then Ashdale and Burtonwood. These blocks included lifts, an innovation for the time. The shortage of building materials at this time required a great deal of improvisation and recycling of material.

When Woodberry Down Estate was built it was considered to be an 'estate of the future' (Daily Star, 1949).

The school was listed Grade II in January 2007 because it was '...the first permanent post-war LCC school to be designed.'

DETAILED HISTORY

The London School Plan produced by the LCC in 1947 included as its first priorities a handful of primary schools to be built in, or near, large housing estates under construction, in particular its own estates at White City, Tulse Hill and Woodberry Down. Plans for Woodberry Down Primary were commissioned as early as May 1945, along with Tulse Hill (demolished) and Abney Park. The school in Woodberry Down was begun in early 1949, just after construction began on Horn Park (Eltham, now demolished). The 1947 plan provided for a primary school for 560 children and a nursery school for 120 children at Woodberry Grove on the County Council's new Woodberry Down Estate, the largest of its immediate post war developments. The design largely as built, was in fact published in January 1948 in both the Architect and Building News and the RIBA Journal (it is clearly for Woodberry Down, although it is not named as such). In December 1946 permission was sought to erect the school in two sections to meet the immediate need for places. Work began in January 1949 and, while not the first permanent post-war LCC [school] to begin construction, it was the first to be designed. It is also the earliest to survive. The London Government Act of 1939 permitted the LCC to buy any work of art or contribute to its cost or maintenance, and a second Act in 1940 allowed it also to commission art. In late 1951 the LCC enjoyed something of a windfall, when the Arts Council granted it a number of works salvaged from the Festival of Britain. The 'scraffito' mural by Augustus Lunn was taken from the South Bank's 'Seaside' exhibit, designed by Eric Brown and Peter Chamberlain immediately in front of the Royal Festival Hall It. Two other murals and some sculpture were also from the Festival of Britain, and were installed at Woodberry Down Secondary School; they were taken into store when that building was demolished. Lunn (1905~86) was a specialist painter of murals. Particularly in tempera, the cement medium used in the Woodberry Down mural seems to have been a novelty. He taught at Kingston School of Art for much of his career, in his private work straddled the boundary between realism and abstraction, much inspired by Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Wadsworth. He was also highly regarded as a restorer of murals as well as a painter of new ones.

SUMMARY OF IMPORTANCE AS A LISTED BUILDING

The London County Council Woodberry Down Primary School was conceived just after the Second World War in the London School Plan of 1947, its design was published early in 1948, and work commenced in the following year.

Research has shown that it has special historic interest as the first permanent post-war LCC school to be designed (and none begun any earlier survive). The school survives remarkably well, and its quintessentially early post-war Scandinavian-inspired styling remains apparent and is rare in this period when most schools were of prefabricated construction and an altogether different aesthetic. For this it has special architectural interest, represented in the quality of the pale brick work, the matte tile work,

the shallow pitched roofs and blocky massing, the jaunty lettering and the impressive scraffito mural imported from the Festival of Britain’s South Bank site. It is one of a small group of non-prefabricated schools that illustrates the capital’s immediately post-war approach and that compares well with the one other listed school of this period in London (the Susan Lawrence School, LB Tower Hamlets).

Separately listed is the nation’s first NHS health centre at Woodberry Down (John Scott Health Centre, 1948-52), and these two components of the LCC's progressive estate both have individual special architectural and historic interest as exemplars of their type.

SOURCES: English Heritage Research and Standards Dept. 'Woodberry Down Primary School' internal report, July 2006. 'L.C.C. Primary School for 80 Nursery Places, 240 Infants and 320 juniors’ in Architect and Building News January 9th, 1948, Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner. London 4: North. Buildings of England p 538.

Sgraffito ("scratched", plural Scraffiti and often also written Scraffito) is a technique either of wall decor, produced by applying layers of plaster tinted in contrasting colors to a moistened surface, or in ceramics, by applying to an unfired ceramic body two successive layers of contrasting slip, and then in either case scratching so as to produce an outline drawing. A combed wall surface is produced by dragging a comblike tool over a prepared surface, producing stripes or waves.