St Paul’s School, Wellclose Square, is a Victorian Church of England school at the south end of the parish of Whitechapel. A thriving primary school, it is a picturesque presence in the middle of a square, a quiet and sylvan location. Its history is a reminder of the proximity of this end of Whitechapel to the river and the docks.

Wellclose Square was laid out in the 1680s as Marine Square. Its substantial houses attracted numerous sea captains and at the centre of the square’s gardens there stood a Danish–Norwegian church, built in 1694–6, first designed by Thomas Woodstock and seen through to completion by Caius Gabriel Cibber, himself a Dane, Italian trained, and principally a sculptor. The port’s timber trade underpinned the Scandinavian presence. In the 1830s the Sailors’ Home, also known as the Brunswick Maritime Establishment and the first institution of its kind, was built just to the west, on what is now Ensign Street. After Dock Street was widened to improve connections with the London Docks, the seamen’s church of St Paul, Dock Street, opened in 1847.

St Paul’s School, Wellclose Square, from the west in 2018. Photograph by Derek Kendall for the Survey of London

In 1858 the Rev. William Weldon Champneys, Rector of Whitechapel, proposed attaching schools to St Paul’s. Five years later, an infant school opened on the first floor of 21 Wellclose Square (it soon moved to No. 12). St Paul’s newly appointed rector, the Rev. Dan Greatorex, raised an alarm about attempts by the Anglo-Catholic clerics based at St George in the East, the Rev. Bryan King and the Rev. Charles Fuge Lowder, to gain control of his district and to buy the Danish Church of which they were then tenants, for an extension of their Romanizing project. With support from the Bishop of London, A. C. Tait, Greatorex was able to secure control of the district in 1864 for St Paul’s, and thus to evict Lowder and the churchmanship he represented from Whitechapel. Greatorex and his chapel wardens acquired the former Danish church through the Bishop of London’s Fund in 1867–9 for the purpose of providing Church of England schools for local working-class and poor children, especially those of seamen. First funds were secured and an appeal was launched with a target of £4,500.

Detail of west entrances. Photograph by Derek Kendall for the Survey of London

What was to be St Paul’s National Schools were intended for a district with a population of 9,668, mostly seamen, dock and wharf labourers and their families, estimated as being a third Anglican, a third Catholic and Jewish, and a third of ‘no distinctive sect’. The schools would accommodate 150 boys, 150 girls and 300 infants, and ‘counteract the vice and demoralization which abound’.[1] Greatorex’s building committee embraced notables from both Whitechapel and Wapping and included the Rev. James Cohen, Rector of Whitechapel, Lacy Hipwood, Secretary, Charles Addingham Hanbury of Truman’s brewery, Augustus W. Gadesden and William Straw of Leman Street, John Whyte of Upper East Smithfield, Henry Sadler Mitchell of Prescot Street, Joseph Loane, a Dock Street surgeon, John Butler, a haberdasher of 42 Wellclose Square, William Henry Graveley, a City surveyor, Capt. Francis Maude, Chairman of the Sailors’ Home, Capt. George Troup, and Thomas Joyce and Robert Henderson from Wapping.

First plans were for conversion of the church, with an inserted floor for boys’ and girls’ classrooms above space for infants, and the addition of a large new east range, at an estimated cost of £6,000. By April 1869 it had been agreed that the church could not be converted, its north wall being said to be badly out of upright. It would be necessary to erect a new building, though ‘not without regret’,[2] as was claimed, and not without opposition that favoured an open recreation ground. The architects were Greatorex and Co., the rector’s brothers, Reuben Courtnell Greatorex and Simeon Greatorex, of Westbourne Street Mews, Hyde Park Gardens. The contractor was Thomas Ennor of Commercial Road, and Joseph Fairer made the schools’ clock. Gadesden laid the foundation stone on 21 December 1869 and the Prince and Princess of Wales (Princess Alexandra being Danish) opened the schools on 30 June 1870, with a roll of 143 boys, 165 girls and 283 infants. The final cost of the building all told was recorded as £7,193 10s, with £7,955 3 9 having been raised.

The Gothic schools building, of stock brick with red- and white-brick and Portland stone dressings, occupied the whole of the church’s walled plot (125ft by 75ft). It reused the church foundations and retained vaults that had been used for burials. There were long boys’ and girls’ classrooms either side of a spine wall, raised on arcades above undercroft playgrounds. Infant classrooms were in a separately roofed east range. Houses for the master and mistresses flanked the twin west entrances above which there rose a clock tower. Open trefoils mark all the gables, and some original window tracery survives. Cibber’s figure of Charity breastfeeding an infant from the Danish church stood on the stone plinth in the central recess below the dedication stone until 1908. Lettering is in relief, not inscribed, and a ship surmounted the clock tower’s weathervane.

Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statue of Charity in the niche above the schools’ west entrance. From Harald Faber, ‘Caius Gabriel Cibber, 1630–1700’, 1926

Ship weathervane. Photograph by Derek Kendall for the Survey of London

Attendances rose to 199 boys, 168 girls and 382 infants in 1874 before declining to 97 boys, 111 girls and 198 infants in 1891; large numbers were Jewish. By this time support came from the Whitechapel Foundation, then the London County Council took on responsibility. Improvements were mooted as necessary in 1905 and loans were approved. The infants’ department was altered in 1908, externally by the raising above the eaves of the three central windows of the east elevation, internally by the removal of an organ, probably rescued from the Danish church. There were also two triple-seraph sculpted bosses in the schoolroom’s ceiling, one of which still survives. These works were overseen by T. J. Bailey for the LCC, with G. E. Weston as the builder. Attendances fell to 174 mixed and 82 infants in 1929, and a reorganisation scheme that was approved in 1939 fell foul of the war.

Infants’ range from the northeast. Photograph by Derek Kendall for the Survey of London

Seraph boss by Cibber, reused from the Danish Church in an infants’ classroom. Photograph by Derek Kendall for the Survey of London

In the planning of wider post-war reconstruction, consideration was given to moving the school in the 1950s. Instead, it was extended to the south in 1960–2, with Thomas F. Ford & Partners as architect and William Verry as contractors for an assembly hall and kitchen. Princess Margaret opened the hall on 20 February 1962. It has laminated timber arches with the profile of an inverted ship’s hull. A copper model of a fully rigged ship on the south entrance elevation of the hall was a weathervane on St Paul, Dock Street, repaired and regilded in 1953, and moved around 1990.

An advertisement for a new Headmaster in 1966 sought ‘Liberal-Catholic’ churchmanship for a ‘challenging multi-racial area’.[3] A prefabricated nursery room went up in gardens to the south-west in 1970. The school was listed in 1973 and numerous minor alterations followed. The playground undercroft had its former openings definitively bricked up in 1985–6 with the original tracery emulated. A major refurbishment programme in 2010–11 overseen by Wilby & Burnett, architects, included T-plan brick-faced classroom extensions to the south-west (nursery and reception) and east (first and second years).

The assembly hall of 1962. Photograph by Derek Kendall for the Survey of London

Copper ship model from St Paul, Dock Street, on the south wall of the assembly hall. Photograph by Derek Kendall for the Survey of London

1. The National Archives, ED103/111/1

2. London Metropolitan Archives, P93/PAU2/145

3. London Metropolitan Archives, P93/PAU2/247