The Guardian has published an obituary to the architect of Pimlico School. Without doubt the school can lay claim to being the most controversial school of Central London. Politically, Architecturally, and Educationally controversial it was always doomed. Maybe if it had been controversial about two of the three it would now be hailed as the beacon that broke the mould? Certainly one of the first zero carbon foot print buildings designed 30 years before we discovered global warming, deserves a better fate.
Pimlico School
Sometimes a single building becomes the focus for an architect’s endeavours and reputation. For John Bancroft, who has died aged 82, that building was Pimlico school. Not only did Bancroft design and see this striking landmark of the 1960s through to completion, he also waged an unremitting and lonely struggle for more than a decade to save his cherished creation from destruction, to no ultimate avail.
Pimlico was political from the start. A monument to the comprehensive schooling policies of the Inner London Education Authority and the architectural vagaries of the Greater London council, it was imposed in 1967–70 on a razed and open urban block in the heart of Tory Westminster. A little earlier, and a school in a tower block might have faced off against the surrounding stucco terraces. But by the mid-60s the experts knew what children could do in and to lifts. So Bancroft, the GLC‘s inhouse job architect, opted for a walk-up building of four storeys only, linear and compact, with a stepped section to maximise daylight. The lowest storey was sunk to the levels of the former townhouse basements. Out of this pit, like a creature in a zoo, grew the concrete-and-glass school, glaring at the rectangle of streets all round. Boxy projecting classrooms with canted glazing, supposedly self-cleaning, completed the brutalist effect of provocation.
Unluckily for Bancroft, Pimlico school was out of date when it opened. Educational ideas change fast, and he had been handed an outdated brief. The bigger spaces worked well, but the classrooms were inflexibly shaped and grouped, while the double-height concourse that was the school’s heart was never put to full use after the departure of the enthusiastic first headteacher, Ken Green. Worse, the heating and cooling system was rapidly vandalised, and no lasting solution to the extreme solar gain that was supposed to save the planet & heat the school could be found.
When Westminster council, casting greedy eyes upon the site, decided in 1995 to redevelop half of it with luxury flats and create a smaller school on the other half under a PFI scheme, the idea proved hard to combat. Bancroft, by then long retired but always a doughty campaigner, summoned up influential architectural allies and saw the first scheme off, maintaining that simple changes could renew the school. But he was hamstrung by his inability to get Pimlico listed, ministers taking the expedient view that inherent design faults impaired its architectural value. The last remnants of Pimlico school disappeared this year in favour of what the Guardian calls a faceless substitute – for myself – I quite like the replacement.
