The British History website [visit link] tells us of the school's
history at this site:
"Sixth Form Centre at former George
Green's School
In the decade following the Education Act of 1870, the
school established and endowed by George Green in 1828 at the corner of Chrisp
Street seemed increasingly inadequate, both because its premises were
constricted and because its continued provision of elementary education seemed a
limited use of its endowment. The Charity Commissioners therefore agreed that
the school trustees should establish a 'middle class' school giving a wider
secondary-type education. The Chrisp Street school was closed in December 1881,
by which time the trustees' architect had applied to the Metropolitan Board of
Works for permission to erect a school on part of the site of Monastery House.
He was (Sir) John Sulman (1849–1934), who had recently designed church and
schools for Congregationalists at Highbury.
The site had been acquired by
exchange for the Chrisp Street site, although the new one was more than twice
the size of the old. After the Poplar Board of Works insisted on a set-back
frontage to widen the road, work went ahead in the hands of Ashby Brothers of
Kingsland Road, at a tendered price of £10,596. The design was published in
November 1883 and the school was opened in June 1884. The final total cost,
including fittings, was between £13,500 and £14,000.
The school was designed to
accommodate, as a dayschool, 200 boys and 200 girls (constituting formally
separate schools until 1901). They paid modest fees relievable by endowed
scholarships and received a grammar-school-type education to the age of
16.
Sulman's plan was carried out more
or less as published — but omitting an infants' classroom in a northwest
wing — and still largely survives in the present building.
The plan of the ground floor, where
the boys' school was located, was in two main parts differently arranged. On the
east five large classrooms and a lecture room were placed on either side of a
wide central corridor, from which they were separated but not wholly concealed
by glazed partitions. On the west a large assembly- or lecture-hall, rising
through the first-floor level, had smaller classrooms on one side, some capable
of being opened into the central area. The rooms of the girls' school, on the
east side of the building at first-floor level, repeated the arrangement of
classrooms along a corridor. A flat roof-playground was provided for the
girls.
The architectural treatment,
carried out in red brick and stone, in a manner a little reminiscent of James
Brooks's St Columba's, Haggerston, was successfully aimed at the picturesque
(Plate 24a). Each part of the building was expressed externally, with a roof of
its own raised to a telling silhouette of 'Greyfriars' rather than London School
Board type. The feeling is northern European and the effect, if lacking
something in forcefulness, is memorable and individual. The interior is of less
interest in its handling except for the hall, which is of pegged-pine
construction and might well be associational architecture attempting to create
the effect of a stateroom in a big Poplar-built ship.
Two defects in the building were
soon evident. One was the lack of laboratories, remedied in 1902 by a
north-easterly extension (architect, William Clarkson of Poplar). The
other, never fully remedied, was the lack of play-space.
The first 25 years of the school's
life showed that its endowments were insufficient to support it when the
collapse of Poplar's modest prosperity made fee-paying very difficult. In 1909,
therefore, (with effect from 1910) the school was taken over by the LCC, with
the approval of the trustees, but somewhat against the inclinations of the Board
of Education. The school was thus one of London's very few endowed secondary
schools to be 'maintained'. In 1923 it became one of the first coeducational
secondary schools in London at sixth-form level.
On the centenary in 1928 of the
foundation of the school (in Chrisp Street) the George Green Association
fulfilled Sulman's design by adding the projecting clock to the tower on the
road frontage. In 1968 it was decided that the school should become
comprehensive and move to a new building in Manchester Road, opened in 1976. The
old building reopened in 1977, providing teaching to pupils in subjects not
taught by their own schools at sixth-form level or those from schools without a
sixth-form.
Apart from the loss of the
high-pitched roof of the clock-tower during the war, and the unsightly post-war
additions on the top floor facing Sturry Street, the exterior in 1993 was not
much changed since 1884."