Patrick Comerford
Bloomsbury House at 2-3 Bloomsbury Square, on the south side of Bloomsbury Square was built in 1887 for the College of Preceptors. The building is familiar to many for its façade with the relief busts in roundels beneath the windows on the first and second floors of five pioneering figures in the field of education and teaching.
But as I looked up recently, I wonder how many passers-by can identify these five eminent figures who stare down on the people of Bloomsbury below, or who can tell what is a preceptor.
Bloomsbury is bounded by Tottenham Court Road, New Oxford Street, Euston Road and Woburn Place and Southampton Row to the east. Bloomsbury Square was first laid out in the early 1660s for Thomas Wriothesley, 4th Earl of Southampton. The Russell family owned extensive estates in London by the end of the 17th century, and the Bloomsbury Estate became part of the Bedford Estate in 1723. The Bloomsbury Estate was developed in several phases, from the 1660s to the 1850s.
The five figures on the façade are an eminent educationalist and the busts represent: Johann Pestalozzi, John Milton, Friedrich Froebel, John Locke and Thomas Arnold. The College of Preceptors, now called the Chartered College of Teachers, moved out a few years ago and the building has been restored as a suite of meeting rooms for the Bonnington Hotel group.
The College of Preceptors was a Victorian institution founded to improve the standard and status of teaching by providing proper qualifications. It was founded in 1846 by a group including Joseph Payne, its first professor of education, and the formidable Frances Buss, headmistress of the North London Collegiate School.
The College of Preceptors began in 1846 when a group of private schoolmasters from Brighton met to discuss the their concerns about standards in the teaching profession. A committee formed in early 1846 was chaired by Henry Stein Turrell (1815-1863), principal of the Montpelier House School in Brighton. After meetings in London and Brighton, a general meeting in London in 1846 was attended by 300 schoolmasters attended and 60 members were enrolled.
The College of Preceptors was incorporated with a royal charter from Queen Victoria in 1849. The college created a system for the formal examination and qualification of secondary school teachers. It was one of the first bodies to examine and provide certificates for secondary school pupils.
The college helped to establish education as a subject at university level in the 1870s, and Joseph Payne was appointed as the first Professor of Education in 1873. The right to appoint Professors of Education is recognised in the college’s current royal charter.
In the 1950s the college pioneered management training schemes for teachers and school administration courses. A supplemental charter in 1998 changed the name to the College of Teachers, and a further supplemental charter in 2017 changed the society to its current name, and permitted granting members the status of Chartered Teacher.
Bloomsbury House, now a Listed Grade 1, was built in 1887. It was designed in a Flemish Renaissance style by the architect Frederick Pinches (1852-1925). His other buildings in London include: Hackney Baths (1894-1897), co-designed with Edward Harnor and later known as Kings Hall Leisure Centre; the Alliance Bank (1884), Regent Street; and Parr’s Bank, Stratford (1897-1898), now Burrows House.
The three-storey, three-bay house, with a basement and attic, house was built in red brick with enriched ashlar dressings, a steeply pitched, hipped slate roof with an elaborate pedimented ashlar dormer centre piece carried up with carved escutcheons.
The deeply recessed semi-elliptical central doorway had a moulded reveal and a double panelled door approached by steps.
There are two-light mullion and transom windows. The central three-light bowed oriel window on the first floor has an enriched apron and the dado of the second floor window above is carried on a round oriel parapet. There are composite pilasters defining the window bays of each floor carried in dados with carved, foliated panels and with busts centrally in each bay.
The centre bay projects slightly between paired pilasters with a continuous arcaded frieze capped by segmental pediments. There are arcaded parapets on the outside bays, and the windows on the second floor have arched heads.
On the façade are five roundels, under the windows on the first and second floor. Each displays a relief bust of a pioneering figure in education. The five famous educators who stare down onto Bloomsbury from two rows of roundels on the façade are:
Top left: Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), Swiss educationalist and author
Top centre: John Milton (1608-1674), poet, polemicist and ‘acrimonious and surly republican’
Top right: Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), German pedagogue, pioneer of modern education and inventor of the kindergarten
Bottom left: John Locke (1632-1704), empiricist philosopher, known as the ‘father of liberalism’, and at one time a political refugee in the Netherlands
Bottom right: Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), headmaster of Rugby School
Inside the building, the geometrical staircase has a wrought-iron balustrade staircase and there are stained glass windows portraying the founders.
The original preceptors elected against buying land to build their college, and chose a 99-year lease because it was a cheaper option. But when the lease ran out, land in Bloomsbury was worth a premium and they had to relinquish their premises. The College of Teachers moved into the Institute of Education, part of University College London, in Bedford Way in 2003.
The original terms of the lease of 2 Bloomsbury Square insisted that the building remained a teaching establishment. The auditors Coopers & Lybrand (now PWC) adopted it as their training centre. The building was restored in 2007 and is now run by the Bonnington Hotel group and is rented out for meetings and as an events space.
