Lancing College, West Sussex, part II
In the second of two articles, John Goodall examines the outstanding school buildings of Lancing College, an institution celebrating its 175th anniversary
BUT for Lancing College’s stupendous Gothic chapel, its school buildings would surely be much better known than they are. Despite their scale and interest, they seem to crouch insignificantly beside this vast structure, literally and figuratively overshadowed by it. The founder of the school, the High Church clergyman and educational campaigner Nathaniel Woodard, would undoubtedly have approved, but he might have been disappointed as well. Although he never lived to see the chapel completed, he invested huge energy into realising the school buildings, driving forward their construction as funds came to hand.
As we discovered last week, Woodard’s ambitious aim, first set out in a pamphlet of 1848, was to create affordable schools across England and Wales for the Christian education of three different degrees—upper, middling and lower— of the middle classes. He began this process modestly in 1847, setting up a day school in New Shoreham, West Sussex, where he was curate. This foundation was eventually subsumed by the Shoreham Grammar School and Collegiate Institution (later the college of St Mary and St Nicolas), which opened its doors in the Old Vicarage in the town on August 1, 1848, Europe’s year of revolutions. The boarding school aimed to prov ide ‘an education for the upper portion of the middle classes—sons of gentlemen of limited means, clergymen, professional men et cetera’—at the cost of £30 a year for board and education.
In Woodard’s view, boarding promised to remove boys from ‘the noxious inf luence of home’. By the regimen of small-scale communal life, he hoped they would be ‘moulded into habits of self-control and moderation’. The school did not, in fact, thrive immediately. Much more successful was a second school for the middling sort—sons of tradesmen, farmers and clerks—costing £18 18 shillings a year. This likewise opened in Shoreham and, by the end of 1850, had more than 100 pupils.
Work immediately began to design purposebuilt homes for both institutions by an experienced church architect, Woodard’s friend Richard C. Carpenter. He produced comparable proposals for both institutions, which were laid out in English medieval fashion around quadrangles. In each case, the scale and detailing of the architecture reflected the relative status of the boys. The junior institution was to be built in nearby Hurstpierpoint, where a foundation stone was laid on June 21, 1853, but the senior was initially intended to occupy a level site at Shoreham.
