Description

786/0/10150 MCMILLAN STREET
26-JUN-02 Rachel McMillan Nursery

GV II

Open-air nursery school. Opened 1914, surviving main range 1918, 1921, 1933, 1937-8, architects of last phase London County Council Architect's Department in succession to Edward Unwin who extended the offices in 1933. Stock brick, steep tiled roofs with short stacks to rear. Two classrooms, each self-contained with own toilet and washing facilities, with two-storey office range at end originally of 1918 and with later superintendent's flat over. Classrooms have glazed canopy on timber columns to shield their south facade, surviving substantially from . Large timber windows and doors to classrooms. Office entered under round-headed door with gauged brick head; meal windows to office, those to upper windows with horizontal panes. North elevation largely of unwindowed brick with short canopy to office range. Interiors have painted brick, timber doors, the individual classrooms with their own ablutions.

The Rachel McMillan Nursery School was until the war the only large school built specifically for nursery age children (under fives), and was internationally important. It was the achievement of two sisters, Rachel McMillan (1859-1917) and Margaret McMillan (1860-1931), and while it was been substantially rebuilt in the years immediately following Margaret's death it still demonstrates their beliefs in a healthy open-air regime and careful nurture as the best means of giving urban children a good start in life. While the other, always limited, built evidence of their lifelong campaign for child health and welfare in London and Bradford have gone or fail to demonstrate the qualities they stood for, the main part of the school from 1918-21 substantially survives as evidence of their work. Since Margaret believed in light-weight temporary shelters as the best form of school building, that something should survive is remarkable. The regime established by the school was for a nine-hour day, with the children having their morning wash and three meals at the school, an afternoon nap and a large amount of time spent in outdoor play and nature studies. An obituary of Margaret McMillan in The Labour Woman for May 1931 describes her as 'the most heroic figure in the world of education up to now' for her vision, oratory and persistent dedication to the cause of child health, and she was the English equivalent of Maria Montessori for her work with underprivileged urban children. The classrooms of 1921 were opened by Queen Mary, and in later life her patrons included Lord and Lady Astor, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay Macdonald; her earlier career was bound up by that of the Independent Labour Party, of which she was a founder member. This is the most significant nursery school of its date in England. The architect to the school in the 1930s was Edward Unwin, who died in 1936 but who was the son of Sir Raymond Unwin, the distinguished town planner, and who established brick, and large timber windows behind the earlier glazed canopies as the principal idiom of the school.

Sources
The Labour Woman, May 1931, p.68
Minutes of the Management Committee of Rachel McMillan School, 1929-39, held at London Metropolitan Archives
Commission on Nursery Buildings, 1933
D'Arcy Cresswell, Margaret McMillan, A Memoir, 1948
G A N Lowndes, Margaret McMillan, the Children's Champion, 1960
Margaret McMillan archives, Lewisham Local Studies Library
District Surveyors Returns for Greenwich, held at London Metropolitan Archives

External Links

• Historic England Listing
• Wikidata Q27086004

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

Recommended Books

• 
  Listed Buildings, Conservation Areas and Monuments
• 
  Development and Design of Heritage Sensitive Sites: Strategies for Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas
• 
  Northumberland (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Department for Communities Listed Historic Buildings of Northern Ireland: Information Guide for the 2nd Survey of Historic Buildings
• 
  Lancashire: Liverpool and the South-West (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough (Pevsner Architectural Guides) (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)