Standing on the sweeping steps of the grade II listed Riddlesworth Hall in September 1983, Kirsty Cornell waved goodbye to her parents as they headed back to Hong Kong. At the age of nearly nine, a new girl joining the ranks of boarders at the rural prep school near Diss in Norfolk, it was the first and only time she would be allowed to use those steps until she was collected three months later at the end of term.
“That was just one of those odd rules,” the former florist and aspiring children’s author explains. “We couldn’t use the main carpeted staircase unless we were with our parents either.”
Other memories that are writ large include assemblies in the hall, which was decorated with a menagerie of stuffed kestrels and owls displayed in glass cases. And pets’ corner, where bins of sawdust kept for the rabbit hutches were used to stash smuggled sweets.
Notable former pupils of Riddlesworth include Diana, Princess of Wales
CAMERA PRESS/SPEN/AL
Thirteen years earlier, Viscount Althorp (later the 8th Earl Spencer), had dropped off his daughter Diana (later the Princess of Wales) at the same steps for her first taste of life in boarding school. She was reportedly sent there to distance her from the messy wranglings of her parents’ divorce.
Today, the click-clack of sturdy heels marching along the Victorian tiled floor of the dining room of Riddlesworth no longer installs terror in the hearts of young girls. In April this year the school announced that it was going to close after admitting that it was struggling to maintain the house and grounds because of the economic climate. The 24.5-acre site was put on the market with Savills for £3 million; it’s now under offer.
In doing so Riddlesworth has joined an ever-increasing group of large country houses whose future roles look uncertain after acting as schools for well over half a century. The grade II listed Ashdown House in East Sussex, alma mater of Boris Johnson, closed in 2020 after 180 years, citing the impact of the pandemic.
More recent closures include Loreto Prep School in Altrincham, Ashbrooke House School in Weston-super-Mare and Deepdene School in East Sussex. This year Abberley Hall in Worcestershire closed its doors after more than 145 years and only months after it was named best prep school by Tatler magazine. Savills is looking for a buyer for the 93-acre estate (for an undisclosed guide price). Wickham Court Prep School in Kent, named a top school by The Sunday Times in 2019, also closed in March.
Abberley Hall’s grounds extend to 93 acres
Many prep schools were set up in country houses that had become insupportable as family homes thanks to heavy death duties introduced after the Second World War.
Some had been irreparably damaged after being requisitioned. At the outbreak of war 20,000 country houses were earmarked for use by the Ministry of Defence.
In Our Uninvited Guests, the author Julie Summers recounts how Lord Sherborne had just finished refurbishing his house in Hampshire when he received a telegram informing him that the Portsmouth Day School for Girls would be arriving in 48 hours.
Other country houses were converted into schools almost by accident. The evacuation of the junior section of Wimbledon High School for Girls to Hanford House in Dorset during the Second World War inspired the owners to carry on the school themselves, and it’s still going today.
Several buildings have been added to Abberley Hall over the years
Seventy years on, the roles are reversing. “There has definitely been an uptick in the number of former schools coming to the market,” Stuart Jones of Savills says. He worked on the sale of St Mary’s Shaftesbury, a Catholic girls’ boarding school which ran into financial difficulty. The buildings and 55 acres of grounds were bought in 2012 by Dorset council, which is turning it into a school for children with special educational needs.
“In this case, it made so much sense for the buildings to continue to be used for a school,” Jones says. “Other futures for these large country houses include being converted into smart retirement homes or divided up into flats. For them to revert to being a single dwelling really depends on the location — it must be highly desirable.”
The Abberley Hall Estate, which once operated as Abberley Hall School, is now for sale through Savills
Charlotte Petch and her husband know what it’s like to live in a house that was once used as a school. They moved back to the UK in 2022 after several years of living and working in Singapore and bought North End House, a five-bedroom house in Ditchling, East Sussex.
The property was once better known as Dumbrells, a co-ed prep school which ran from 1882 until closing in the 1980s. Its alumni include the Queen, then Camilla Shand, her brother Mark and her sister the interior designer Annabel Elliot. The family grew up in nearby Plumpton.
Better known as Dumbrells, North End House was once a co-ed prep school attended by Queen Camilla
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
“One of the interesting things about living in an old school that I hadn’t anticipated is that so many people have an emotional investment in the building,” Petch says as she talks about plans to make better sense of the rooms. “We don’t want to tread on memories. Our plan is to bring the house into the 21st century without removing every trace of its past.”
Despite it being a home for over three decades now, there were still clear signs of its previous institutional life. Some of the floorboards in the old classrooms and common rooms still have visible splodges of ink on them.
The open-plan kitchen/living room at North End House
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
“The biggest structural change has been the conversion of one of the formal school rooms into an open-plan kitchen/living room,” Petch says. “We considered changing the main staircase as it had been knocked about many times and repaired with various differently coloured pieces of wood. But then we felt that it would be losing a bit of the history so we’ve kept it and painted it in a soft white instead.”
In May 2020 the Times Educational Supplement forecast that as many as 30 per cent of the UK’s private schools could face insolvency soon. Three years on, and with continued pressure on finances, particularly from the rise of teachers’ pension contributions, the cost of living crisis and the potential VAT on school fees from a Labour government, their futures are in more doubt.
Dumbrells alumni include the queen
GETTY IMAGES
“While the most prestigious ones are fine, some of the small, sometimes family-run prep schools are financially on the edge,” explains Sophie Oakes, an educational consultant who advises families on navigating the independent school system.
“Some other nationalities such as the Chinese, Thai and Spanish, who like to send their children here for a year of English before they start senior school back home, are effectively propping up these schools,” she adds.
The living room, where during renovation works some of the floorboards still had visible splodges of ink
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
“There is another factor creeping in,” says Jess Simpson, who runs a property buying agency and has bought several former schools for clients who are now turning them back into homes. “It’s the maintenance costs. Many of these prep schools are in listed buildings and the expense of running them is tipping the balance.”
She advises anyone thinking of buying a former school to invest in a thorough survey first. “It’s unlikely they are coming to the market in mint condition and these properties are sometimes over 20,000 sq ft in size — that’s a lot of roofs to retile or rising damp to fix.”
Petch advises anyone thinking of buying a former school to invest in a thorough survey first
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
The benefits — for those with deep enough pockets — are sizeable. Not only do these former prep schools sometimes come with the sort of sweeping drives and parkland setting that set a potential buyer’s heart aflutter but they have lots of outbuildings too.
“Planners will probably take kindly to a proposal to remove a 1970s classroom block in favour of a more sympathetic indoor pool complex for example,” Simpson adds. “Another attraction is the reduced rate of VAT which is charged at 5 per cent when converting a former commercial building into a residential dwelling.”
Credit: Source link