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Let’s find another name for campus
• “GOLDEN Lane Campus” will hardly be the right name for the new buildings on the Prior Weston Primary School site in EC1.
That was the name referred to in your report of the topping-out ceremony (Bodies find last resting place, May 18).
Hardly any Islington residents live in Golden Lane, which is a border street with the City, but 2,500 City flats abut it.
It will house Prior Weston Primary (for children aged five to 11), the primary school part of the Richard Cloudesley School (for disabled children) and the Fortune Park Children’s Centre (for children aged three to five). There will be 420 pupils and 158 staff.
A new name is needed and perhaps a competition could be held.
“Prior Weston” is not the most suitable name. Sir William Weston was the lay prior of the large Order of St John of Jerusalem priory nearby and of which only the gatehouse remains.
He was given an annual £1,000 (about £100,000 in today’s money) pension by Henry VIII for handing over the valuable assets of the order which reopened 150 years or so ago in St John’s Wood, where it operates the hospital of St John and St Elizabeth.
The pension was described as “a noble maintenance for those days” and Weston was “favoured beyond most of the heads of monastic houses”, according to a book by Thomas Cromwell. His brother, Sir John Weston, was a courtier, a rather useful connection.
A more suitable prior would have been John Houghton, prior of the Charterhouse, also nearby. He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and other monks were “boyled in oyle” at Smithfield, according to one source, for not assenting to the Act of Supremacy in 1535.
It has been called the “Golden Lane Campus” because the architect, Jayne Bird, lives in Golden Lane and she understandably must have thought it a suitable working title. However, it has become in continual use, perhaps because the word “Golden” has an attractive ring.
“Campus”, though, is an Americanism now used by universities. It is slightly absurd to apply it to a school for children aged three to 11.
Hardly any Islington children live in Golden Lane. Most are on the estates around Whitecross Street, to which the new school will have a 260-foot frontage, compared to the 125-foot Golden Lane frontage.
Most children will enter through the Whitecross Street frontage and through an entrance in the middle of Fortune Park, which is adjacent to the school.
I asked an architect father with a child at Prior Weston to try to see about getting the Whitecross Street side to look more like the main entrance and I understand something was done. But the tallest of the three buildings is still in Golden Lane. It will be interesting to see what will turn out to appear to be the main entrance when the building is finished – Golden Lane where virtually no Islington children live or the Whitecross Street main thoroughfare where most live nearby.
Finsbury residents certainly will not want the new school to appear to be a City facility.
LEO CHAPMAN
Dufferin Street, EC1 |
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