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Inter-war school design in Edinburgh: the thread about weaponising the bricks and mortar of education in the “Crusade Against Consumption”

I got a new book, which is really interesting. And I mean really interesting. It’s not just about school buildings themselves, but about the social history that goes hand in hand with them. It’s a real work of labour and love by someone who spent much of their working life in education in Edinburgh.

Fabric and Function. A Century of School Building in Edinburgh, 1872-1972, by Walter M. Stephen

Our starting point and the starting point of the book is in 1872, the year of the Education (Scotland) Act which made primary education in Scotland mandatory between the ages of five and thirteen (although not yet free). Previously education had variously been administered by the various churches – predominantly the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Free Church of Scotland and United Presbyterian Church – but also the Scottish Episcopal Church and various burgh and parish bodies, charitable trusts etc. The Act consolidated this provision (although for now the Episcopalians decided not to join in) into some 1,000 local School Boards across Scotland, which found themselves inheriting a huge and varied array of school building stock, much of which was not purpose built.

The roundel of the Edinburgh School Board, “the female figure of education” dispensing knowledge to the young. Dean Public School, one of the ESB’s first new schools after the 1872 act. © Self

Edinburgh and Leith at this time each had their own School Boards and both set about a building programme of new schools to meet the demand to educate the 18% of children who were not in regular education, as well as to replace the old and substandard facilities they had inherited: the Boards were responding both to legislation and the societal pressures at the time. It is worth considering that the extent of Edinburgh was far less than it is now, and the surrounding parishes of St Cuthbert’s, Cramond, Colinton, Corstorphine, Duddingston, Liberton, Portobello and the exotically named South Leith Landward each had their own boards, even if these only managed a handful of schools.

What is very relevant to the modern world (considering this thread was first written during the times of COVID-19) is the efforts that the Boards and their architects went to in utilising school building design in responding to infectious diseases. This became something of a guiding obsession for Edinburgh and Leith (later merged as the Edinburgh Education Authority, which would in turn become the city Corporation’s Education Department) in the first half of the 20th century. The authorities were bringing the physical structure and layout of schools into service as a weapon in their holistic war against infections diseases such as Tuberculosis, Cholera, Typhus etc.

At the turn of the 20th century the Edinburgh School Board’s latest “public school*” was typified by Albion Road (later Norton Park). These were handsome, imposing, multistorey monuments to education, frequently crammed in with quite some skill on the part of the architects to small and irregularly shaped plots in densely populated urban neighbourhoods. The capacity was usually around 800-1000 children.

* = note, in Scotland a Public School is a state school open to the general public, as opposed to England where it is a fee-paying one, public only in the sense it was open to pupils who could pay, rather than based on their religion or parental trade or profession.

Albion Road School, postcard probably dating from the time of its opening in 1905

The goal of these schools was to provide bums-on-seats capacity to educate an urban population that was still at that time growing. Their planners imagined them to be permanent monuments and as such the build quality was high and their finish was grand and monumental. Contemporaneously in Edinburgh the “the crusade against Consumption” (Tuberculosis) was being pioneered by Doctor Robert William Philip (later Sir Robert) who instituted a coordinated, multi-disciplinary and multi-agency approach to fighting the disease. He opened the world’s first TB clinic at 13 Bank Street in the Old Town in 1887 and in 1894 opened the Victoria Hospital for Consumption in Craigleith House which would soon grow to become the Royal Victoria Hospital for Consumption, a role it would perform until it became a geriatric hospital in the 1960s.

Sir Robert William Philip (1857–1939) by James Guthrie, from the collection of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

Philip’s integrated approach was “to isolate patients from family and friends and offer sun, fresh air and exercise“. By 1906 such provision in had expanded to include the City Fever Hospital – under the supervision of the city’s dedicated and energetic public health officer Robert Henry Littlejohn – on the southern outskirts and even a farm in Polton, Midlothian, for occupational isolation. Robert Morham, the City Architect, designed the City Fever Hospital on the principal of Robert Koch that “sunlight is the great germicide” (n.b. it was called the city hospital on account of it being funded directly by the city; the Royal Infirmary on the other hand was funded as a charitable institution). Voluntary notification for TB had started in 1903 in Edinburgh and in 1907 it was made compulsory; 5 years before this was the case nationally.

Edinburgh City Hospital for Infectious Diseases, “The City Hospital”

The British Government would not formally adopt Philip’s approach until 1912, so until then Edinburgh really was at the cutting edge of response and treatment. The city had an unusually high rate of TB, but this was because Philip was so successful in identifying and recording it – a good example of a sampling bias.

The schools that the Boards had built after 1872 had always paid attention to ventilation as a result of the Victorian public health obsession with miasma (“bad air“) and also because there was a fundamental snobbishness about the “unpleasant odors” of poor children. Look closely at the schools of this time and there are ventilators – both hidden and decorative – everywhere.

Albion Road, now Norton Park CentreBonnington Road, now Bun-sgoil Taobh na PàirceRegent Road, now Out of the Blue StudiosStockbridge Primary

Those ventilation cowls often hid mechanical extractors, sometimes in the form of an Archimedes screw.

Diagram by the Glaswegian engineer and ventilation pioneer Robert Boyle, from his 1899 book on the subject “Natural and artificial methods of ventilation”

A quest for clean air in Edinburgh’s schools started in 1906 with air quality testing. In 1910 an awareness conference was organised for teachers and senior pupils, followed in 1911 by 20,000 free calendars being given away in a “Crusade Against Consumption” campaign. Recognising the role that malnutrition had in weakening the immune system, experiments were made in providing free school dinners for the most needy children; initially a plate of soup and some bread. The success of this scheme saw a dedicated “feeding centre” – a central kitchen – established in 1911 in the surplus school building of West Fountainbridge. This provided free school lunches for needy children – so long as they came to school to collect their daily ticket – and was later expanded into a “penny dinners” service for those who could afford to pay the 6d a week.

Soup and bread is served for lunch at North Canongate School, c. 1914. The man with the moustache and white apron is the headmaster. Note the lack of shoes on a number of the boys’ feet.

The authorities were of the conviction that you could actually stamp out a disease, not just treat its symptoms, something we might take as a given now – but not so at the time. Although the Victorian Board schools had a focus on ventilation, frequently this was found not to work so well in practice and the schools themselves were often crowded, dark and with small, poorly-positioned playgrounds.

Playtime at a School Board era school. A crowded area with poor ventilation and lighting. Note the shadows cast by the tall school building itself, and the boy second left who has no shoes.

And so attention was turned to the design of the school buildings themselves. In 1904 an open-air schools movement had started in Charlottenburg near Berlin with the Waldschule für kränkliche Kinder (“Forest School for Sickly Children“). Here, children were taught outside where possible and the building was designed to allow as much of the outside in as possible, with the sort of extensive, inward pivoting glazing more akin to modern house extensions than an Edwardian school.

Waldschule für Kränkliche Kinder, 1904. Note how many windows there are and that they are all pivoted in to provide ventilation in addition to the rooftop ventilators

Edinburgh was not slow to recognise the possibilities and in 1911 six members of the School Board were sent on a fact-finding mission to Cologne, Munich, Zurich, Paris and Middlesex to see how to do it for themselves. On their return, such was the impression that had been made that at a stroke, school design in Edinburgh changed forever. While the fully outdoor system was rejected – on account of the city being “a northern temple of the winds” – they found other ways to implement its basic theories.

Class photo at an unidentified Edinburgh school, 1925. Such schools were typified by small, hard-surfaced playgrounds, frequently dark and oppressive from the tall walls, surrounding tenements and a general lack of consideration being given to natural lighting. This is an infants class, as after this stage of their education boys and girls were separated. CC-by-NC SA Edinburgh Collected, Donor number 0525-018

The new schools would be built on much larger plots (see the table at the bottom of this page) so that they could be reduced in height to one or two storeys, rejecting the multi-storey buildings that had become the norm to cram as many children as possible into small plots. They would be a single classroom deep to allow cross-ventilation and natural lighting from both sides. The buildings would be located on the north of the plot to put the playground in the (relative) warmth and light of the sun to the south. Schools also came to be considered less as permanent temples to education but as something more transient; they should be adaptable, cheaper to build and have room to expand as required. Bricks, wood and extensive use of glass wood take over from the traditional, solidly conservative Scots masonry.

A first, transitional step was made with the new Tollcross School by Alexander Carfrae, Architect to the School Board, in 1911. This replaced two very crowded and constricted 19th century schools at Lothian Road and West Fountainbridge. Designed for 800 children, while it was not designed entirely to open-air principles, it was laid out as two narrow blocks arranged in a T-shape, with classrooms extending the full width of the building so that they were lit from both sides. On both levels the rooms were accessed by external verandas to the rear – a rather common Victorian feature in deck access “sanitary” housing for the working classes.

Tollcross Public School, 1914 © Edinburgh City Libraries

The next new school on these principals was planned in 1912 as King’s Park School in the St Leonard’s district. This was similar to Tollcross but arranged as an L to make better use of the plot’s complex topography, pushed to the northeast of the site to place the playgrounds in the south and west to get the best of the sun. By the time this school was completed, WW1 had broken out and it was immediately requisitioned by the War Office for billeting for troops. By the time it was returned to the School Board in 1918 it was decided to open it as a Technical School (later called an Intermediate School, later yet a Junior Secondary) called the James Clark School.

Former James Clark School with its remarkable corner tower – it was felt by deliberately increasing the ornamentation in one focal point of the building that detail could be reduced elsewhere, resulting in a net reduction in overall cost. Notice the upper storeys are accessed by external walkways

After WW1, it would take some time before the new combined Edinburgh Education Authority (which replaced the separate School boards of Edinburgh, Leith and surrounding parishes of Liberton, Cramond, Duddingston and Corstorphine) was ready to start building schools again. The first of these were Stenhouse and Balgreen schools in the city’s new western council suburbs, opening in 1930 and 1932 respectively. These buildings, which are variations of the same basic plan, kept the two storey height, with expansive glazing to the south and open verandas to the north and arranged around a central courtyard. Classrooms were arranged along a “spine” only one room deep, with windows on both sides for maximum daylight and cross-ventilation. Again as at Tollcross, each room was accessed from an open walkway rather than an internal corridor. An additional advantage of the spine arrangement was that it greatly cut down noise within the school building; gone were the large central staircases or atria, gone were the classrooms accessed through other classrooms and gone were the thin partitions between rooms, all of which served to amplify and carry noise around the building. Facilities such as offices and store cupboards were pushed to the outer ends and for children there was the luxury of internal toilets, again sited hygienically at the ends of the blocks but no longer a chilly run across a playground away.

Balgreen Primary. Notice that the external corridors are now covered in by glazing and the library building to the right of shot

They were built of rendered brick and steel for economic purposes but the conservative outlook of the authorities was well impressed upon its architects and they still had traditional slate roofs and ventilator cowls and restrained classical detailing in stonework. Both schools are notable in including public libraries as part of the project, an early example of a community approach to education.

Stenhouse Primary. Notice that the external corridors are now covered in by glazing and the library building to the right of the frame.

By the times these last two schools were opened, the Education Authority had been merged into the city Corporation as its Education Department and school design had passed to the office of the City Architect, headed by Ebenezer James Macrae. His team developed Carfrae’s ideas further into a standard two-storey school for the city’s new housing schemes which were on unprecedently large plots up to 4.5 acres. These maintained the south facing playground and classrooms arranged along spines with an overall open arms shape, with the facilities pushed to the rear (north) side. Schools at Craigentinny, Craigmillar, Granton and others all followed this basic pattern.

Granton School. OS 1944 Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandCraigentinny Primary School. Notice the substantial use of glass to admit the maximum possible amount of daylight. CC-by-SA 2.0 Anne Burgess

The adoption of this standardised design and the new construction methods also reduced costs. The 700 capacity Stenhouse and Balgreen came in at £43 per pupil; the “standard” schools of 800-1000 pupils reduced that to £27-32. But although the architects and accountants had gotten the upper hand in those designs, those desirous of a more pure interpretation of the “open air movement” managed to get their way with one school, that at Prestonfield, which was part of the same 1930 programme of school building as Stenhouse and Balgreen.

Prestonfield Primary School. 1944 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The design was outsourced to the Derbyshire school architect Bernard Widdows and even the casual eye can see from the map above and photo below how different it is from its local contemporaries. Arranged around a central courtyard with all round verandas, it was largely single storey and was finished in red facing brick and rooftiles; its English architect was confident enough in the use of his materials not to hide the bricks away behind harling.

Prestonfield Primary School

There were wide verandahs along the sides (long since boxed in), with folding glass doors on the inside of the courtyard to open the rooms up to the fresh air, but protected from the worst of the elements. Each classroom was painted in a unique and welcoming colour and three miles of underfloor heating pipes kept the place warm. Children were encouraged to sit on the floor as a result, not just arranged in ranks on hard bench seats as in the previous generations of schools.

The inner courtyard of Prestonfield School, note the all-round verandah and the folding glass doors to allow light and fresh air into every classroom. The dormer windows provided additional natural lighting into the classrooms from above.

In 1935, the centre of the inner courtyard had an ornamental fountain installed as part of a scheme of introducing artworks into schools. This sculpture was commissioned from Thomas Whalen of Edinburgh College of Art and depicted a mother and child. It was entitled The Bath. Sadly all this came at an expense, and at £50 per head – almost double that of the City Architect’s standard – the experiment was a one-off.

The fountain sculpture, in a sunken rose bed, at the centre of Prestonfield’s courtyard. A hitherto unthinkable extravagance for the benefit of children at a public school. The sculpture of mother and child was the work of Thomas Whalen of Edinburgh College of Art

But all these schools were fundamentally an extension of the concept of the pavilion wards of Dr Philip’s consumption hospitals but in a classroom format; a maximisation of daylight and fresh air.

Pavilion Ward in a Consumption Hospital. The south aspect of the ward was open to the elements.

These principals also carried over to nurseries for the poorer neighbourhoods, including the Princess Elizabeth Child Garden of 1929 in Niddrie, again with the open verandas.

https://twitter.com/StevenMRobb/status/1485242920429047812?s=20&t=r9AbKbIVM28gTBTp1PpdTQ

And also in Niddrie was 1935 Children’s House. This was an area of the city where many people were relocated as a result of the slum clearances of the insanitary Old Town and St. Leonard’s and they brought the health and social problems they had inherited from their old neighbourhoods with them. You can see below how the whole windows swing out and each room has a door onto the playground, very reminiscent of the Waldschule für Kränkliche Kinder.

Robert Philip died in 1939 at the age of 81. In his later years he declared TB to be “on the run” in Scotland. Since 1901 the death-rate for pulmonary TB in Edinburgh fell from 165 per 100k population to 48 per 100k in 1950 and from non-pulmonary TB from 87 per 100k to 5 per 100k.

Philip’s grave marker in the Grange Cemetery. CC-by-SA 4.0 StephenCDickson

Philip made took all sorts of enlightened approaches to his crusade, one of which was hiring Miss Agnes Craig in 1906 as a health visitor; Edinburgh (and perhaps Scotland’s) first female to undertake this role. It was Agnes’ job to go into the home and explain and persuade people (mainly women) to implement preventative measures. “Her tall and stately figure was a familiar one in working class districts where she proved to be a welcome and understanding visitor.” She also listened to what the women and children she met had to say to her – they were much more open than they would have been to a male visitor – and reported this back.

Agnes Craig (standing, with hat on) at work in an Edinburgh tenement

Dr Phillip’s Royal Victoria organisation was merged with the City’s public health department in 1913 and Agnes continued her work in it, retiring in 1934 after 28 years’ tireless service. We are very lucky to have a picture of her at her work in a 1950 report by the Corporation. Anyway, the moral of the story is that over 100 years ago they knew about the importance of an integrated public health response and good ventilation and school design to combat airborne infectious diseases. And they did something about it.

SchoolYearArchitectCapacityPlot size (m² / acre)Stockbridge1877Rowand Anderson6002,180 / 0.53Canonmills1880Wilson8001,950 / 0.48South Bridge1886Wilson11002,720 / 0.67Broughton1896Wilson13604,450 / 1.10Craiglockhart1902Wilson / Carfrae10855,100 / 1.26Tollcross1911Carfrae8006,400 / 1.58King’s Park1914Carfrae8503,890 / 0.96Stenhouse1930Carfrae7009,520 / 2.35Prestonfield1931Widdows70012,940 / 3.20Granton1934City Architect1,05017,910 / 4.43Changing school sizes in Edinburgh, 1877-1934

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