To mark my 50th High Times post, I thought I’d loiter a little longer on the first floor of the old building.  As words aligned with visual images has always been my creative medium of choice, it’s probably no surprise to you all that I have chosen to meander back into Art.

The growth of Art at Newcastle High School/Church High School is actually a very interesting story.  A real case of ‘Changing Rooms’.  As I was accompanied by Zoe Robinson on my March 12th tour with Nick White, going round the Art Block was high on our list.  We already knew from the plans that NHSG is to have four Art rooms as opposed Church High’s three, but the size of the rooms was of great importance to Zoe in particular, knowing she will now only have one of the two smaller rooms designated for her use.  A very hard thing to take when the large Sixth Form space used to be her own domain.

Artwork always spilled onto the surrounding corridors at Church High.  Because of this, the whole building felt vibrant and colourful.

This school has always possessed a very creative spirit, but you certainly knew what to expect once you were through the Art doors.

Although the Church High Art Department had only enjoyed the purpose-built, light and airy studio spaces in the Barbour Wing since 1999, the very first Art Room at Newcastle High School was actually situated only a few paces away.  Indeed, by my estimation, part of it will become the Creative Arts Faculty Office.  That full circle again.

It is clear from Miss Dickinson’s account of returning to her old school as a mistress in the Jubilee History, that the room beyond the Hall on the left side of the main corridor was ‘the drawing pantry.’  Whether the room known as The Studio by the late 1920s and credited with helping the Art teaching so much that ‘every year a number of girls go on to Art Schools’ (Page 43) is the same room, I really can’t be 100% sure.  The slanted beams in the picture below cause me to doubt this space is the room we know as Room 9 (RS).  If anyone does know, please leave a comment, as, in my time, the only area of the main building with slanted beams like this is the very top floor.

My feeling is that The Studio – a wonderful room cited elsewhere as a favourite form room owing to a curtained area at its rear where marvellous things were stored on shelves – probably came into being following the first extension to the building in 1928.  It’s typical of ‘Church High thinking’ that interior expansion was made possible without sacrificing the outside space necessary for girls’ health.  The Jubilee History tells us that ‘a new laboratory’ was built ‘out on pillars over the playground, so that it was level with the first floor and could be reached through the old drawing pantry’ (Page 42).

By the time I began teaching at Church High, this space had become a large Geography room once the Science Department moved to new premises in Curtis House in 1958.  Because of its size, the Geography room was always used as the Dressing Room for the cast of School productions.  This spacious room was a luxury and was divided up into two separate Geography rooms when the modern Art extension was added as part of the Millennium building programme.

For some time up to this point, the Art Department had been housed up the road in Gurney House which stood next to a bright red pillar box.  This building, 4 Tankerville Terrace, was bought in 1946 and opened in 1947 by Louisa Mary Gurney, the school’s longest serving & most influential Headmistress after whom the house was named.

When I arrived, Jean Taylor was Head of Art.  After she left, there was an interim period of one year still in Gurney House when the department was lead by Frances Clark, most ably supported by Art Technician Scott Valentine, before Slade School of Art trained Grant Wells was appointed to move the department into its new building.

Under Grant Wells’ creative leadership, the Art Department went from strength to strength.  There was more of a focus on Fine Art and, following the appointments of Zoe Robinson and Jessica Kinnersley, Sculpture and Textiles were integral to the curriculum.  Exam results were superb, girls went on to Art School and Church High artwork was regularly displayed at The Sage at Prize giving.

It has been said that ‘The future is a blank canvas’ and this is surely ‘music’ to an artist’s ears, if you can excuse the mixed metaphor.  I am sure that Zoe, in her innately creative way,  will continue to pass on her passion for Art to NHSG girls even in a much smaller space.  Like you,  she now knows she will be working in a very special studio from September – in the room that was inventively created on stilts.

 

I’m sure when you think of the first floor of the old Church High building, it will be the Hall that comes to mind straightaway.  It’s certainly that way for me.  For the last 131 years, there has been a timeless quality about this space that has been very reassuring.  Things can’t stay the same forever though.  As the saying goes, ‘The only thing that is constant is change’ and, sadly, that goes for rooms too.

To continue our little game of ‘I Spy’, how many of you noticed the first stage of structural changes to the Hall from the pictures above?  And I don’t just mean the removal of the old Honours Boards which are at present being kept in storage.  The architects want the Hall to be a much lighter space so two square vents have been opened up near the apex of the north and south walls.  As this room will now be the Sixth Form Common Room and include a kitchen area, a smaller square has also been cut into the south wall for an air extractor unit.  At the north end, the stage entrance and exit doors have now gone.  The door stage-left has always provided access to the platform for the Headmistress, as one of the earliest pictures of the Hall in the 1910 Newcastle High School prospectus shows.  The performance door stage-right was cut into the Honours Boards at a later date.

The addition of light sources in the roof space just shows everything comes full-circle eventually.  When the Tankerville building first opened, new electric lighting was not installed; instead the Hall was lit by gas-lights.  Natural light would have flooded in through dormer windows in the roof, however, a trade-mark Oliver & Lesson design.

Many such ‘modern’ features of the original building’s design were heralded in a fascinating little article published in The Newcastle Courant in the late 1880s reporting on the plans for the new school.

It refers to the first floor of Newcastle High School as follows: ‘The whole of the teaching departments, including the assembly hall, class rooms, art rooms, and science laboratory, are placed upon the first floor, with a view to obtain better light and air….. The Assembly Hall will be a handsome room, with panelled dado and open timbered hammer-beam roof … There are three separate entrances shown upon the plans, and two main staircases for approach to the first floor.’  The article goes on to record another ‘modern’ feature: ‘The whole of the rooms are intended to be warmed by open fireplaces, with the addition of hot water pipes and coils, the latter being so arranged in each classroom as to warm a large volume of incoming fresh air.  Each room has a separate system of pipes provided with a valve, so that the heating power will be entirely under the control of the teacher.’ Which leads neatly back to ‘I Spy’ again.

At the very centre of the lovely image above of Home Economics teacher Lynn Batchelor signing autographs for girls on the last day of Church High, you will spy something grey.  Get used to this colour.  There will be a lot of it in the refurbished building.  Here it is the painted mantel of an old fireplace I must have put my mug of water on countless times without thinking about it over the years.  All the teaching rooms on the main corridor had a slanted wall which clearly marked old chimney pieces and I remember many a lesson in the ‘old days’ when girls’ heads would turn uneasily in lessons because of scratching sounds behind them.  Mice they said; pigeons most likely.

Certainly the oblique chimney breast wall in my classroom, Room 5, always served me very well as an English display board.  As we found out when Tolent started the preparation work for the strip out, what actually lay behind the plaster was something like this.

I prefer to think of these covered over hearths and fire places, all clearly integral to a state-of-the-art Victorian heating system, as they would have appeared in their prime.  As this photograph from the very first prospectus makes clear, each teaching room had one.

As I mentioned in an earlier post (24th February), Hayley Temple, one of the EWA architects who was instrumental in displaying the High Times and Heritage website links on the NHSG Project page of the company website, incorporated the three surviving fireplaces revealed during the renovation work into the new design.  The fireplace I photographed then was positioned in the corner of Room 7.

However, the one I saw for the first time on 12th March was even more beautiful.  The tiles on this one, very appropriately for the new school, were teal coloured.  And it was my ‘old friend’ from Room 2.

Along the main corridor now, Wates were in the process of installing the most up-to-date modern radiators (white of course) into rooms.

I’m sure they will do their job excellently, but there’s a part of me which will always fondly remember the solid, Victorian, sky blue ‘monster’ in Room 5.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it matched perfectly The Newcastle Courant’s description of ‘hot water pipes and coils, the latter being so arranged in each classroom as to warm a large volume of incoming fresh air.’  Indeed it did its job so well, I invariably had to have all the windows wide open, as my pupils will recall!

But this blog is meant to be looking forward to the future as well as reflecting back on happy memories of the past, so I shall end this post with an image of the newest addition to the first floor teaching rooms within the old building.  This area of the new extension fills the space where the fire-escape adjoining the old social staffroom used to be.  There’ll be plenty of scope to play ‘I Spy’ from here!

Enjoy your tour of the first floor of the old building beginning here and ending at Rooms 7 & 8 at the opposite end of the main corridor.