More information : Shirebrook Model Village Primary School was designed by the architect George H. Widdows (1871-1946) and was completed in 1908. It was one of a large number of new schools built to Widdows' designs by Derbyshire County Council in the early 20th century. Derbyshire had the greatest percentage increase in population in the country in the 1890s, particularly due to the growth of the coal mining and textile manufacturing communities in the east of the county. Widdows had come to Derbyshire in 1897 as Chief Architectural Assistant to Derby Corporation. Following the 1902 Education Act, responsibility for schools in the county passed to Derbyshire County Council. In 1904 Widdows was appointed architect to to the Council's Education Committee. In 1910 he was appointed Chief Architect to the Council, although schools remained his predominant concern. By the time he retired in 1936, he had designed some sixty elementary and seventeen secondary schools.
Widdows was at the forefront of the movement to build schools in which high standards of hygiene were as important as educational provision. The first major conference on school hygiene was held in 1904, and in 1907 the Board of Health brought in legislation which required schools to become subject to regular medical inspections. Shirebrook Model Village Primary School was finished a year later. Widdows worked with his Medical Officer, Sidney Barwise, and two deputy architects, C. A. Edeson and T. Walker, to develop a series of innovative designs introducing high levels of natural daylight and effective cross ventilation in schools. His designs, in a neo-vernacular style, were characterised by open verandah-style corridors linking classrooms with generous full-height windows. His distinctive and influential plan forms were based on a linear module which could be arranged in different configurations to suit the size of school required and the shape of the available site. This was a significant move away from the standard Board School plan introduced by E. R. Robson, with its central assembly hall and classrooms to three sides.
Widdows' pre-1914 elementary schools can be broadly divided into four plan types. The earliest was the 'marching corridor' type (of which the blocks of the Shirebrook site are examples), with corridors wide enough for boys to perform drill. The concern over the physical fitness of schoolchildren emanated from the Boer War of 1899-1902, when over a third of the men called up to fight were found to be physically unfit. Only five schools were built to this experimental and rather expensive plan. The second type was more standardised, being linear in form, with a larger classroom at each end, and often with a freestanding hall and linking corridor to the rear. The earliest examples of this type date from around 1910-11. The third type was the most dramatic, a butterfly-shaped plan with pairs of classrooms leading from the corners of a central hall. The fourth type was designed for irregularly-shaped sites and had a corner hall, octagonal in plan. The advances Widdows made in school planning were quickly recognised by his contemporaries. In an article on provincial school building in 1913, The Builder stated that his work 'constitutes a revolution in the planning and arrangement of school buildings... a real advance which places English school architecture without a rival in any European country or the United States.'
The Shirebrook Model Village Primary School is an early example of the 'marching corridor' plan form about which Widdows later said 'Plan No. 1 was my first attempt at cross lighting and cross ventilation and I like this plan as well as any'. At Shirebrook it is used in three buildings, two of which are sited parallel to each other on the east side of Central Drive, forming the eastern blocks, and a third on its western side. All parts of the school site currently remain in educational use.
The eastern blocks are constructed of plain red brick, laid to Flemish bond on a plinth of blue engineering brick. The buildings have plain tile roof coverings, dentilled verges and tall brick chimney stacks which flank the entrances to the central corridor and its junctions with the central crosswing. The marching corridor plan comprises a spinal corridor with one central and two end gabled crosswings. The street frontage elevation of the westernmost of the two buildings has three wide gables linked by the former marching corridor. Each gable has a central semi-circular-headed arch above a central two-light window. Above this in each gable apex is a stepped group of slit breathers. The former verandah corridors to this elevation have been removed and late C20 joinery fitted to the openings. The end elevations have a wide central gable flanked by tall chimneys and tall classroom windows. Set back within the gables are the entrance doors beneath deep, flat canopies. The sections of corridor between the crosswings originally had three-bay verandahs supported by timber arcade posts set on tapered padstones. Within the verandahs are double doors and windows to the classrooms within, and above, in the roof slope, are three-light flat-roofed dormer windows.
Internally, the spine corridor passes through the length of the building, forming the central portion of the hall area in the middle crosswing, and ending at the original cloakroom areas in the end crosswings. The corridors have arch-braced roof trusses, between which are the reveals to high level dormer windows. Where they pass into the crosswings, there are glazed screens and doorways, some now partially infilled The central halls have wide arch-braced trusses, three-light windows with low-level hopper lights and fireplaces to either side of the opening to the central corridor. Each end crosswing has a first floor staff room accessed by means of a winder stair.
Shirebrook Model Village Primary School is one of the earliest surviving Widdows designs. Its eastern blocks are considered to be the best-preserved of the six 'marching corridor' plan type schools. The two blocks represent the foundation for the development of a variety of innovative plan forms for a new generation of school buildings, and although both have been adapted for modern educational use, all of the main features which characterise subsequent school designs can be identified in the Shirebrook complex. These include corridors as links between different areas, arcaded open verandahs, high and low level windows for both ventilation and illumination, hopper and pivot windows and glazed screens. Spatial planning related to both physical and educational well-being lay at the heart of these early designs, and as Widdows himself observed 'architects generally regard schools as the easiest buildings to plan, and much difficulty arises from the fact that architects will not take the trouble to understand the educational side of the case.' In this early design, functional but carefully thought-through architectural detail is combined with an awareness of how a new kind of school needed to work. It was pioneering educational architecture which, a century on, remains fit for purpose, and retaining its legible plan form, fully justifies the claim to special interest in a national context. (1) |