page_title: Bournemouth School
section_title: Buildings
hierarchical_section_title: Bournemouth School / History / Buildings
caption_attribution_description: English: Bournemouth School, Porchester Road
context_page_description: Bournemouth School is a boys' grammar school and co-educational sixth form in Charminster, Bournemouth, Dorset, England, for children aged 11 to 18.
context_section_description: The original Victorian school buildings occupied a plot in Porchester Road. Adjacent to the main school was the purpose-built boarding house (pictured), in which the headmaster and a select number of boarders lived (at an annual fee of 12 guineas). As the number of students increased (200 in 1904, 306 in 1914, 479 in 1925), so too did the accommodation; the school encompassed a former Royal Victoria Hospital in 1925 for lower school classes, which was situated in the nearby Lowther Road. The two sites were known within the school as "Porchester" and "Lowther".
  In 1935, planning for new school buildings on the northern fringe of Charminster began. Various proposals were considered and the Council decided to allocate 10 acres for the new school in East Way. Building operations were begun early in 1937 and the Foundation Stones were laid on 25 May. They were erected from the designs and under the supervision of Mr. W. L. Clowes, M.Inst.M. and Cy. E., Borough Engineer and Architect and a well-known Bournemouth Rotarian from 1936 onwards.
  They opened in 1939 and were first occupied by the boys from Porchester and Lowther in conjunction with evacuees from Taunton's School in Southampton. Soon after, HORSA huts were erected to the north of the main buildings to house more classrooms. Further extensions to the buildings were made in subsequent years, with the canteen (previously above the Old Gym) built in 1957, a new physics laboratory built in 1958, Rooms 40 and 41 (now 9 and 10) in 1959, a new chemistry laboratory in 1961, a steel-framed structure above the single-storey north-eastern section (at the time of building, notorious for rocking in the wind) in the early 1990s and office space for Housemasters and admin staff later in 1992 (at the time the present House system was introduced). Larger scale building works include the Sixth Form Block in 1968, the Art, Technology and Maths Blocks in the 1990s and 2000s (replacing the HORSA huts) and the Sir David English Centre in 1999 (replacing the increasingly neglected, vandalised and subsequently demolished pavilions). The Sixth Form Block made no provision for social space, and so the Sixth Form Memorial Hall (now Drama Studio) was opened in 1974 to provide a common room for use by the students. What was formerly a bike shed beneath the Junior Playground, and then a woodwork room, now forms the Sixth Form common room.
   In 1973, the school hall burnt down. Evidence of the fire can be seen in the wooden flooring tiles in the doorway of Room 21. The new hall was opened in 1975. Its floorpan encompassed what had previously been two corridors running along either side of the old hall, thereby making much better use of space. Furthermore, the old hall had no electricity supply or dressing-rooms, meaning that despite the short-term disruption, Bournemouth School now enjoys a larger and much better-equipped facility for assemblies, productions and other events.
  The old sites in Porchester Road and Lowther Road were used by Portchester School from 1940 until 1989, when it moved to Harewood Avenue. The boarding house was demolished to make way for the Wessex Way in the early 1960s, "Lowther" was demolished in the 1980s, the site being redeveloped into the new Malmesbury Park Primary School, and "Porchester" was redeveloped in 1990 into Fenwick Court, a housing estate. Nothing, therefore, of the pre-East Way buildings remains.
caption: The boarding house was adjacent to the main school building in Porchester Road.
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