Worthing High School for Boys Buildings

Buildings History

To begin more or less at the beginning, Worthing Secondary for Girls had put down roots in 1905. In 1914 the school moved to purpose built premises in South Farm Road. It was originally proposed that a Secondary School for Boys should share part of the South Farm Road site, but by 1919 the School for Girls had been so successful that it would require the entire site eventually.

After years of procrastination there came a positive development in July 1919 when West Sussex Education Committee recommended that the County Council should purchase a piece of land on the west side of Broadwater Road which had been offered for sale. The site was of about ten acres in extent and included a cottage. The County Council accepted the recommendation and took out a loan of £4000 from Barclay’s Bank for the purchase of the site which the County Architect Mr Haydn Parke Roberts had declared to be ‘without doubt the finest site available in Worthing for the purpose and in every way suitable for the suggested school’.

Even then there seems to have been doubt over whether or not the school would be built. At a meeting of the County Council in November 1920 Councillor Brackley asked if an assurance could be given that the building would be proceeded with. He added the comment that it was really a calamity that there was no Secondary School for Boys in Worthing. For that he was promptly ruled out of order by the Chairman, Lord Leconfield.

In February 1921 Worthing Borough Education Committee strongly urged the County Council to provide the town with a Secondary School for Boys without further delay, and went so far as to suggest that temporary accommodation be provided at Thurloe House in High Street, or in army huts on the Broadwater Road site, pending the construction of a permanent school.

It is clear from the discussion that the force behind the urgent need for a school was the desire to provide a secondary school for boys from all walks of life, not just for those whose parents could afford to send them to a private school or pay the railway fares for them to attend an out-of-Borough school. The proposal for using temporary accommodation stemmed from the current financial state of the country and the likelihood that the County Council would reject the idea of a permanent school building on the grounds that they could not afford it.

Subsequent meetings at County level ruled out the use of Thurloe House because the accommodation it provided was insufficient and it had been already ear-marked for use as a police station.

While this had been going on public dissatisfaction with the inordinate delay in providing a secondary school for boys vested itself in a petition and letters to the local press. A visit by an inspector of The Board of Education also took place and he concluded, in no uncertain terms, that Worthing was being unfairly treated. Of the two temporary solutions being considered he expressed a preference for the army huts on the Broadwater site, which in his view had the advantage that a permanent successor school could be built subsequently on a different part of the same site.

Further speculation about the shape of things to come was fuelled by the fact that the County had acquired some army huts from a camp in Shoreham and these were being used to provide temporary accommodation for Municipal staff while a new Worthing Town Hall was being built, and by the fact that they had set aside the sum of £600 for the erection of an army hut (already purchased) to lessen the accommodation problems being experienced by the Worthing Girls’ High School.

Mere speculation firmed up to become a widely-held belief that the Secondary School for Boys was built from army huts left over from the First World War. Some said that the huts were from an army hospital. One lady going past the school on a bus in 1928 was overheard telling her companion that the building they were passing was Worthing Hospital.

Much later, in 2008, WA Heritage was commissioned to produce a Historic Building Recording report for Northbrook College (who took over the site in 1963) in relation to the surviving wooden buildings. In the Introduction to their report they said:

‘Anecdotal evidence has suggested that the buildings were World War I military hospital buildings re-used to form a school during the 1920s. A thorough search of the available sources found no evidence for the account that the buildings had previously been used as a World War I hospital. On the contrary, the buildings were purpose built as Worthing High School for Boys with the design featured in The Architect magazine in 1924. Original architect’s plans dating from 1922 to the 1930s also survive showing the original design and later extensions and adaptations as capacity increased from 250 to 450 pupils, becoming the largest boys High School in the county by 1929.’

In April 1921 The County Council announced that there could be no expenditure on building the school that year but they sanctioned preliminary work to produce a rough draft of the requirements for a school with a minimum of 250 pupils. It was March 1923 before preparatory work on the foundations began.

While construction was still in progress announcements were made that R G Martin had been appointed as Headmaster on a salary of £600, and that the School would open on Tuesday 15 January 1924.

The layout of the buildings was designed by the County Architect Mr Haydn Parke Roberts.

The wooden buildings were arranged in a quadrangle with a covered, cloister-like walkway round the entire inner perimeter. The main entrance on the East side facing onto Broadwater Road was described thus: ‘The portico is surmounted by a segmental pediment, above which is a triangular pediment-gable supported by two Tuscan Doric pilasters’, and the Eastern façade in which the portico was situated was described as: ‘a blend of the Colonial Georgian and Middle-West Palladian styles’A genuine effort had been made by the architect to impart a semblance of grandeur to the main entrance.

The Headmaster’s study and the staff room were located in the Eastern flank of the building, and on the Northern flank Room 7 served as both classroom and dining room, and Room 8 as the laboratory for all the sciences.

Only four months after the school opened it was being predicted that by the winter term the number of pupils would have risen to 275, exceeding the minimum capacity that had been planned for and necessitating the recruitment of more staff. By September 1926 the number of pupils was well over 300. As a result of this steady increase it became necessary to increase the accommodation.

In the next few years a succession of further buildings were added to the accommodation and other alterations were made: a new dining hall was added and the old dining/class room converted into two classrooms; in 1926 an Art room, lecture room, and separate physics and biology laboratories were installed; and an Assembly Hall/Gymnasium was added in 1929, these additions together forming two more quadrangles ‘B’ and ‘C’ on the western side of the school, and increasing the capacity to 430 pupils. The Art room, because of its position in the northwest corner of the school and at the end of the heating circuit was said to be the coolest room in summer and Novaya-Zemlyan in winter.

By 1947 further accommodation had become necessary as the complement of boys topped 700. Prefabricated concrete structures were erected in the original eastern ‘A’ quadrangle to house a Geography class room and the library which had long been unsatisfactorily cramped into what previously had been an Art room store, and in ‘C’ quadrangle to serve as senior Chemistry and Physics laboratories. A Music room was provided, in a location separated from the main buildings, and a cloakroom was halved in size to provide space for a Latin classroom.

As the number of pupils continued to increase steadily into the 1950s, further measures were taken to relieve the pressure on accommodation. In 1953 construction of a new Dining Hall was started on the northwest corner of the playing field adjacent Carnegie Road, and was put into use before it was completed. The existing Dining Hall was converted into classrooms. By 1958 the number of pupils was approaching 800. In the next couple of years three further prefabricated classrooms and a cloakroom were erected on the field, and two storerooms were converted for use as small classrooms.

What remained of the field was given over to the College of Further Education before the Ministry finally sanctioned a new building for the High School.

At last, in 1963, a newly built school was ready for occupation. It had been built, not on the same site in Broadwater Road, as had been envisaged originally,, but in Bolsover Road Durrington. The old school buildings were taken over by Worthing College of Further Education. In a final ironic twist of fate the new ‘permanent’ school building in Durrington was eventually demolished to make way for housing, whilst the much reviled but nevertheless loved ‘temporary’ wooden huts in Broadwater Road still stood firm in dogged defiance for some years to come.