Remedial aid makes the grade

Jestico and Whiles gets top marks for an imaginative and extensive refurbishment which brightens a 1960s school with modern materials and interpretations

Words Eleanor Young | Photos Tim Crocker

I have long admired Stoke Newington School for its Brutalist plant room.  It is part didactic, part sculptural and all machine age. This 1967 statement, built by original practice Stillman & Eastwick-Field, has now been matched with an equally strong corten-clad entrance building designed by Jestico and Whiles. It is the shop window of the £17m Building Schools for the Future facelift of Stoke Newington School and Sixth Form. Jestico and Whiles has reworked the circulation, built a new dining hall and super loos, and reconditioned the library, gyms and sports hall – all on top of overhauling access and the ICT infrastructure.

Refurbishment has the beauty of improving on the best of the past, as has been well established with ‘historic’ buildings. But 60s structures also respond well to a little care. With schools, refurbishment also often means a chance to circumvent the formulas used to calculate funding and space, so Stoke Newington School has two gyms and a sports hall whereas a new build school would get two rather than all three under Building Bulletin 98. It also has three more teaching spaces than this recommends. There are other, more dramatic new schools finishing this autumn that might have been more obvious candidates for inclusion in a special feature on schools. But refurbishment has the ring of modesty, austerity, and make do and mend which the government is placing firmly centre stage for at least the next five years.

It all sounds such good sense – saving money and embodied energy and still improving schools. Yet when Scott Brownrigg took a close look at the costs for the British Council for School Environments, the results this summer brought home the truism that you get what you pay for. Refurbishment saves very little – so much is spent to bring an existing building up to scratch on access and services. Rethinking School Capital Investment estimated the cost of refurbishment at £1,600 per m2 while for new build it was £1,915 per m2 (although on the ground this varies from £1,400 to £3,000, as Paul Finch of Cabe has highlighted). Its recommendation for cost effective intervention, beyond a lick of paint, was to concentrate on tactical interventions – something schools and architects have been doing for decades.

Mark Emmerson, the head who was at the school at the start of the BSF process, joked that it was ‘painting schools for the future, not building them’. But Jestico and Whiles has managed more than that. The budget was clearly focussed tactically on certain areas but as always the most visible new build was not what swallowed most of the budget, cleaning the library ceiling and installing acoustic insulation behind it was just one invisible cost. The windows were replaced, after a struggle, with Velfac ones of similar dimensions and large panes of glass but there was only enough money in the budget to replace 80% of them. And if paint was used here and there for effect it was done for highlighting purposes – and like the timber ‘decoration’ of the original this is mainly kept to the ceiling.

Was this cost effective? It has provided a new sense of the school and tackled its oddities for £17.3m, compared to a £30m for the new build City Academy in the same borough – which Emmerson moved to – which opened last year.

Jestico and Whiles had to serve many masters, the end user in the form of the bright and engaged Jill Cameron who managed the process, the contractor client though the local education partnership between London Borough of Hackney and Mouchel Babcock Education. And of course the building itself. First there was the process of getting to know the building and its language. While unearthing the original plans, project director Jude Harris discovered to his delight that the 60s engineer had once worked from the same address as Jestico and Whiles. Like many of Stillman Eastwick-Field’s buildings, the language is strong, vigorous and generous: wide timber hand rails, expansive timber-framed windows, ceilings that work as an extra plane and a 7m wide street. This street runs through the middle of three finger blocks that reflect early school organisation around houses, but the effect is more solid and nuanced, with a series of courts.

Jestico and Whiles had to start with the boilerhouse. In went a biomass boiler for the whole school, and new glazing which gives the bush hammered concrete an extra sparkle. The chimney stack was rebuilt. The boilerhouse now stands proud – brought to life again and complete with visible control panels so it can be used as a teaching aid. Visually, however, boldest move is the new street frontage in Corten and glazed brick with a yellow underbelly of Trespa panels. The look was the most political decision of the project with a huge number of options drawn up for discussion, some replicating the 60s concrete, others offering a contrast with a more vertical presence. Harris is pleased with the results: a raw material to talk to the concrete and quite different window configurations to distinguish the addition. The Corten is not treated as monolithic shell but sliced into horizontal panels of delicate dimensions, the windows either one or two panels high emphasising the horizontality of this addition. They are not Brutalist proportions but a give a taster of those used for the timber-cladding in the library and sports hall.

With paving, lights and planting the entrance now has presence, rather being a kick-around playground with an unclear trajectory through to an invisible courtyard entrance. It faces Hodder Associates’ much troubled Clissold Leisure Centre (which now has a roof that doesn’t leak) and at some point the quiet road in between may be turned into an urban square. But for now it is enough for the school to have civilised, controlled entrance that can attract both parents and sixth formers.

Inside staircases in each of the ‘houses’ meant horizontal access was tortuous. Students had to go down and up stairs to get from a second floor classroom in one block to one at the same level in another block. This caused some congestion. So, ironically, did the extra wide street which was colonised with ancillary spaces leaving just a 1.2m-wide corridor along one main link. Here and there the street would just go down a few steps. So ramps have been inserted, encampments removed (or at least scaled back, here the architects didn’t get their way) and links made.

Before the refurbishment pupils ate in four separate dining halls – another remnant of the house system. So a critical part of the scheme was the new dining hall. It is now right at the heart of the school, light-filled with bold graphics. The space was found by infilling a courtyard. Some of the rooms around it borrow light, the kitchen and small dining hall for example, while massed banks of loos do without it. What is more surprising is the spaciousness of the hall, which obviously could not go above the first floor datum without reducing light into the first storey. To get round this, huge scooping north lights give a lift to the space (2.5m at the highest point) and as a reminder to look up they have coloured reveals. They make a splendid sculptural feature of the roof which is overlooked by the buildings around it.

Many architects have attempted to tackle the problem of loos as sites of bullying and Jestico and Whiles’ plan to gather them together has been tried elsewhere. It is an attractive solution in spatial efficiency and makes possible a centrepiece shared circular washbasin. But this was based on the premise of a member of staff supervising the loos, which now looks unlikely to happen, so whether the layout will help foster positive behaviour remains to be seen.

The sports hall and gyms are unusual with a central rooflight running their length flanked by beams and services behind timber cladding with glulams and steel ties cutting across the ceiling. The abseilers who used to come and cover the glass roof with tarpaulin to reduce glare at exam time are now out of a job thanks to reflective film applied to the cleaned up glass. Years of polish have been sanded off the floors and the spaces look as good as they must have in 1967.

Refurbishment can really squeeze a school. After two years cooped up in Portacabins while first one half of the school then the other was out of action the school is starting to breathe again. And landscaping is under way now.

In fact a whole raft of Jestico and Whiles’ education projects has been completing; four in 2010 with similar numbers for the next two years. From a practice with a reputation for housing and hotels it has become reliant on the education sector. Seventy per cent of the workload of its 46 architects is in education, and luckily only two of its eleven schools have been affected by the cancellation of Building Schools for the Future. Some of the weaknesses in the BSF process are clear from this project, like the way a close relationship with the client in early stages was subjected to the discipline and distance of BSF.

But looking to the future Stoke Newington School shows many of refurbishment’s strengths: generous spaces, character and variety create a rich environment. Beyond the boilerhouse it is not really a didactic building but it is worth taking a lesson from it: refurbishment can be cheaper, but it is not cheap.

Database: Stoke Newington School, London
There seems little point in talking at length about the BSF process, which was bureaucratic, expensive and cumbersome. 

The project was tough at both the design and construction stages. There was a limit to how many walls could be moved, and many hid all sorts of built-in pipe work that held up the first phase of construction. 

Work took place in two main phases (plus landscaping which is still incomplete). During each phase half the school used temporary accommodation on the school site while building took place in the other half.  This is no fun for anyone. For the first few months the temporary accommodation ran on a generator which cut out rather too frequently, playing havoc with ICT.  During the winter simple things, like going to the toilet or making a cup of tea, meant donning your coat and putting an umbrella up.  In the occupied half of the main school we had problems with noise, dust and cuts to services.

Was it all worth it? Yes. The building work has been really well received by staff and students alike and I love showing it off.  We’re participating in Open House this year.  It has had a noticeable impact on behaviour with reported incidents in the new accommodation markedly lower than in the temporary and old facilities.  Some of the contracts we are tied into are expensive and cumbersome, which is concerning in the light of pending budget cuts, but this is balanced to an extent by the joy of not having to dive into classrooms with buckets every time it rains.  This has been an extremely steep learning curve for me, but I will miss working on the project and we’re lucky to have beaten the cuts.

Jill Cameron is director of resourcing, Stoke Newington School

In numbers: 1,882m² (14%) new-build; 5,409m² (40%) remodel; 4,294m²; (31%) refurbishment; 2,008m² (15%) untouched. £17.3m construction cost. 13,593m² (1,500 pupils) post BSF, 11,325m² (1,340) pre BSF. Super-loos: 26 cubicles (girls), 15 cubicles, 16 urinals (boys)