page_title: Ripley Ville
section_title: School
hierarchical_section_title: Ripley Ville / School
caption_attribution_description: English: Scale Drawing of Ripley Ville school north elevation
context_page_description: Ripley Ville or Ripleyville was an estate of model houses for the working classes in Broomfields in the East Bowling ward of the City of Bradford in West Yorkshire, England.
  Started in 1866 the development was built for the industrialist, politician and philanthropist Henry William Ripley. It was intended as a commercial development of model houses but when completed in 1881 had many aspects of an industrial model village – although residency was not limited to Ripley's employees. It was the only model village in the Borough of Bradford and can be compared with Akroydon in Halifax, built by Ripley's friend and schoolmate Edward Akroyd, Saltaire and model housing schemes in other West Riding textile towns.
  Ripley Ville contained 196 workmen's cottages, a school and teacher's house, a church, allotment gardens and, on a separate site about a half-mile distant, a vicarage and ten almshouses which are still standing although all the other buildings had been demolished by 1970.
context_section_description: The school building was financed by Ripley and run by the non-denominational British and Foreign School Society It was designed by Andrews Son and Pepper in a gothic revivalist style. The halls and classrooms were on a single level with service rooms in a basement. Internally the ground floor (total area 4,192 sq. ft.) was mainly taken up by two large halls of double height. The south hall of 1600 sq. ft. accommodated the girls primary school and the northern hall of 1300 sq. ft. accommodated the boys. Two smaller classrooms accommodated the infants. Later photographic evidence suggests that the class room block as built varied from the plan. Instead of two unequally sized classrooms with an entrance lobby to the north there were two equally sized rooms separated by a centrally placed entrance lobby. The entrance door was beneath a gabled semi-dormer with a round window in the gable – very similar to the gables of the north façade.
  The formal entrance to the school was through a carved and columned arched doorway on the ground floor of a very decorative clock tower. The tower was about 75 ft in height and had four clock faces – illuminated at night.
  Each of the two play grounds had a pupils' entrance: junior girls and infants in the west and junior boys in the east. Boundary walls, gates and railings to the street frontages were similar to those of the workmen's cottages.
  The large halls were separated by sliding panels which could be drawn back to create a single space of about 2,900 sq ft. which was used for social events and public meetings. Contemporary press reports refer to the "fine and spacious hall" where "between four and five hundred people sat down to tea."
  The teacher's house had three levels and apart from ornate external stone carving was similar in size and features to the workmen's cottages. The basement contained a storage cellar, pantry and space for a WC. As with the houses and school building it is not certain that any WC's were actually installed. The ground floor contained two living rooms, one with a sink, range and access to a private yard. An entrance hall opened to the stair hall. At the mezzanine landing of the stair was a door into the school corridor. On the first floor there were two bedrooms, each with a fireplace, and a smaller bedroom in the clock tower. Flues from the four fireplaces were carried to a single central chimney stack supported by an arch (hidden in the roof space) across the stair hall. This was unusual and expensive form of construction, but visually impressive.
  Heating of the halls and classrooms was by coke stoves. In the 1880s Ripley's estates department converted the north hall for use as offices. A central heating boiler was installed in the basement and the coke stoves were replaced by radiators. Some features of the building prefigured, on a smaller scale, Andrews and Pepper's design for the grammar school in Manor Row (1872).
caption: Ripley Ville school north elevation
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