| Sowan, Paul W. (2005). Built to last a thousand years: The Stanley Halls and Stanley Technical Trade Schools, Bull Croydon Nat Hist Sci Soc, 124: 2-5. |
Built to last a thousand years: The Stanley Halls and Stanley Technical Trade SchoolsThe Stanley Halls and adjoining Stanley Technical Trade Schools (TQ 339685) on South Norwood Hill, London SE25, were designed by William Ford Robinson Stanley, a founder member and principal benefactor of our Society, and built by him as a gift to South Norwood. An English Heritage blue plaque at the east end of this range of quite remarkable buildings commemorates W.F.R. Stanley, 1829-1909, Inventor, manufacturer and philanthropist [who] founded and designed these halls and technical school. Stanley, early in life, ceased to use his second middle name or its initial, preferring to be known as William Ford Stanley. His manufacturing firm was in due course incorporated in 1900 as W.F. Stanley & Co. Ltd., and was based at his factory in Belgrave Road, near Norwood Junction Station, from in or about 1867 to 1926. And he lived nearby, in first one (Stanleybury) then another large house (Cumberlow) designed by him. Some recognisable parts of the factory building survive within a modern development. Stanley was the inventor, designer, and manufacturer of precision mathematical, scientific and surveying instruments. In his speech at the opening ceremony of the Main Hall and Art Gallery on 2 February 1903 (Stanley's birthday) (the Small Hall and School, and Manager's Residence, were added in the next several years), the designer and donor expressed the opinion that the structure would last a thousand years. Sadly, important parts are now missing. The Croydon Advertiser of 17 December 2004 reported the theft of a seven and a half foot tall bronze statue 'Vulcan' which had graced an alcove at the base of the clock tower for 103 years, and recalled the theft in the 1960s of six (in fact seven) bronze busts from niches on the front of the building. Cherry & Pevsner's The buildings of England: London 2 South (1994) gave a brief description of what they called the 'wonderfully eccentric' and most memorable building in South Norwood (there is little competition!) and one of the 'architectural highlights' of the London Borough of Croydon. Their description is of 'a vigorously eclectic group in red brick and stone, with two towers and a series of gabled roof-lines, adorned with the extraordinary motif of copper flowers in flowerpots. On the gable of the hall a small stone statue holding a torch .. On the clock tower a statue 'Labor Omnia Vincit.' As these reports are incomplete and inaccurate, and in the light of the thefts of ornamental features, I thought it would be as well to compile a more complete description, and inventory of the buildings' external features. The Halls and School form a range of buildings running uphill westwards from Cumberlow Avenue. The eastern (Cumberlow Avenue), south-facing (South Norwood Hill) and western elevations can be seen from the public highways. The principal elements, from east to west, are the resident Manager's House (added by 1909), the Main Hall and adjoining Art Gallery (opened in 1903), the clock tower (with three faces, the clock not currently working), the small hall (used by the School) and the School's entrance, a two-storey school block of four bays (concealing more behind) and a further tower intended originally to house meteorological instruments. A third tall narrow brick bell tower (with bell still in place) rises behind the school entrance. The east wall (Cumberlow Avenue frontage) is relatively plain, although some of the windows are round-headed with stone surrounds. High up on this wall are five roundels, the centre one bearing the date 1909. The two pairs of flanking roundels contain depictions in profile lettered W.F. STANLEY - DONOR, MRS. W.F. STANLEY, FRANK JEFFERY, and FRANK THEOBALDS. Mrs. Eliza Ann Stanley (née Savoury) died in 1913. It seems likely that the roundels were added in 1909 to mark the donor's death (14 August 1909). Frank Theobalds was Clerk of Works during the building, and subsequently resident Secretary and Manager at the Halls. The significance of Frank Jeffery remains to be determined, although a person of this name is recorded living nearby on South Norwood Hill in contemporary street directories. The Large Hall has a bronze (not stone) statue on the apex of the gable. In 1903 this figure was 'holding aloft an electric lamp, pretty by day and very conspicuous when lighted at night,' something of a novelty in Croydon at the time (the first few electric street lights had been installed in the principal streets in the town centre in 1896). Four central niches on the Large Hall façade originally held the following busts:
In two flanking niches there were busts of:
A seventh niche at a lower level above the door of the adjoining Art Gallery held a further bust, of Stanley, identified only as:
At pavement level, either side of the Large Hall, are two stones. That on the left records that it was the foundation stone laid by Mrs. W.F. Stanley in May 1902. The right-hand commemorative stone is lettered:
Charles Thomson Ritchie [1838-1906], 1st Baron Ritchie of Dundee, was the Member of Parliament for Croydon from 1895 - 1905, and served as Chancellor 1902 - 03. A stone tablet to the right of the Art Gallery door is lettered:
The entire roofline, as far as is visible, sports the flowerpots and copper flowers noted by Cherry and Pevsner, including some on the very functional west wall (plain brickwork, irregularly placed plain door and window openings, and a multitude of rainwater and waste-water down-pipes). From the public highway, at least 20 of these can be counted in situ (although the 'flowers' are missing in a few cases), including some on gables at the rear of the buildings. It is apparent that there were probably at least 25 such flower-pots on the two main decorated frontages, although only 19 of these remain. Three are missing from three of the four gables of the two-story school block, as are three from the School Hall gable. In fact, according to the most recent biography of Stanley (by Eloïse Akpan, 2000) all the flowerpots were removed during refurbishment of the buildings in 1987. As a result of the endeavours of some members of the Croydon Society, and a grant from the Croydon Preservation Trust, replicas of broken earthenware pots were made, and the pots and flowers reinstated. Presumably therefore some pots and flowers have been lost in the last ten years or so. Interestingly, the structure appears to have been built by a local man, Alfred Lawrence, of Pembury Villa, 123 Portland Road (a house that had been occupied in 1878 by one H. Parks, perhaps Horris Parks one of the local brickmakers of the day). One might have expected Stanley to have employed James Smith & Sons Ltd, builders, whose ornate office building complete with polished granite columns still stands nearby in Carmichael Road, and who were responsible for some of the grander late Victorian commercial buildings in George Street and High Street in central Croydon. The bricks are distinctive, hard, red, and smooth-faced, and although they do not seem to match others used locally, were probably supplied by one of the several local brickfields active at the time. They may have been supplied by Horris Parks, already mentioned, or the Collis family, both of which concerns were represented on the guest list for the opening ceremony. Curiously, that list does not include any representative of the Pascall family, the other leading South Norwood brickmakers of the day. Stanley had bought the land for his new buildings, a worked out brickfield, from the Pascalls, and they retained offices in South Norwood High Street and continued manufacturing bricks at nearby Harrington Road until World War I. The guest list of the official opening ceremony, and those attending the musical entertainments later that evening, included a number of local notables, amongst them two of Croydon's better-known composers, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor [1875-1912] and William Yeates Hurlstone [1876-1906.] Stanley's architectural drawings for the Halls and School (but not for the Manager's Residence) are now preserved in the care of Croydon's Archives Service, and indicate that the western tower was intended to present a large barometer dial and two large thermometers on its south face. Whether these features were in fact put in place and, if so, when they disappeared has yet to be ascertained. Croydon's Local Studies Library has a number of early views of the buildings, but none of them show the south front of the west tower sufficiently clearly. Paul W. Sowan
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