Former City of London School

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Former City of London School
Victoria Embankment
London, September 2014

“The Victoria Embankment building, a grand building said to be in the Italian Renaissance style but actually in a high Victorian style with a steep pitched roof resembling that of a French chateau, was designed by Davis and Emanuel and constructed by John Mowlem & Co. at a cost exceeding £100,000 (about £11,158,064.52 in 2016). The designers designed the school as ‘amazingly unscholastic, rather like a permanent Exhibition Palace.’ On the front of the building are statues of Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Newton and Sir Thomas More with ‘the first four emphasising the school's literary and scientific traditions [and] the last being a religious martyr, a famous lawyer and the author of Utopia.’ The building remained the home of the City of London School for a hundred years, although the site expanded to include not only the original building on the Victoria Embankment itself, but a range of buildings at right angles along the whole of John Carpenter Street, which was named after the founder of the school, and further buildings constructed at the back along Tudor Street, with the school playground, Fives courts and cloisters enclosed within the site. These other buildings were demolished when the school moved again in 1986. Here the school was adjacent to the City of London School for Girls, which was founded by the City of London Corporation as a sister school in 1894 and moved in 1969 to its present site in the Barbican, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama which has also since moved to the Barbican. It was also next to the traditional home of the British newspaper industry in Fleet Street. This building still stands and is protected by a preservation order; as of 2017 it was occupied by the investment bank JPMorgan, and it appeared on the left of the famous Thames Television ident from 1968 to 1989. The building still features the school's name above the door. The auxiliary buildings in John Carpenter Street and Tudor Street, however, were demolished shortly after the school vacated the premises.” (City of London School, Wikipedia)