Johns, Slater Haward, 1960
Sprites schools, Ipswich
Johns, Slater Haward for Ipswich Borough Council, 1960.
Sculpture reliefs by Bernard Reynolds.
In the 1960s, the Borough Council planned for an expansion of Ipswich to three times its size. This never happened, but there was a considerable and largely unnecessary rebuilding of the town centre to give it a metropolitan character, many of the buildings designed to line an aborted urban motorway.
Not many of these new buildings were good. Perhaps the most notorious was the Greyfriars complex by Vine & Vine (1964-66, largely demolished apart from the towers in the early 1990s).
However, local architectural practice Johns, Slater Haward were responsible for some excellent structures that survive today to adorn the Borough. At a time when brutalism and modernism were fashionable, the firm of Johns, Slater Haward designed buildings of real character, with a jauntiness that looked back to the Festival of Britain, and forward towards the post-modernism of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
Their major buildings in the Borough included Ipswich Civic College (now Suffolk College), Castle Hill United Reformed Church, Harvest House (HQ building fo Fisons, now a business centre), Suffolk House (now AXA Insurance), Colchester Road fire station, and the East Anglian Daily Times building.
They also designed a number of schools for Ipswich Borough Council, which had responsibility for education in the Borough before 1974. The best of these, and a building of national significance, was the group known as Sprites Schools, today converted into a single primary school.
Sprites Schools was designed as a sequence of linked glass pavilions set in a field. The roofs are hyperbolic, curving to low and high points at the corners. Low, structural brick walls do not intrude. Wooden framing for the windows divides the glass walls into pleasing rectangles. Paths and grassed areas were arranged in parallel to walls to create another layer of lines leading to secluded courtyards. The sculptor Bernard Reynolds, responsible for a number of public artworks in the Borough, created reliefs that give a lively feel to the structural walls. When lit up at light, the pavilions were intended to appear like a caravan in the desert.
Unusually for buildings of the time, the schools were intended to mature, with trees growing to surround the pavilions and create a woodland effect. Sir Niklaus Pevsner, in The Buildings of England, admired Sprites Schools greatly, and they are the only post-war school in the county to appear in his Suffolk volume. The overall design has withstood the test of time, although, as with many late 1950s and early 1960s buildings, the schools were created for a low-fuel-price economy, and the lower and upper parts of most of the glass walls have now been filled in to save costs on heating and ventilation.
Addition of a nursery in 1995 celebrated and enhanced the original architecture, but conversion to a single school by Suffolk County Council in 2004 created an uneasy linkage that spoils the openness the main inner courtyard. Even so, the sheer exuberance of the original buildings survives. They are best seen from Hawthorn Drive across the playing fields, especially when lit up on a late winter afternoon.
Johns, Slater Haward, 1960
Sprites schools, Ipswich
Johns, Slater Haward for Ipswich Borough Council, 1960.
Sculpture reliefs by Bernard Reynolds.
In the 1960s, the Borough Council planned for an expansion of Ipswich to three times its size. This never happened, but there was a considerable and largely unnecessary rebuilding of the town centre to give it a metropolitan character, many of the buildings designed to line an aborted urban motorway.
Not many of these new buildings were good. Perhaps the most notorious was the Greyfriars complex by Vine & Vine (1964-66, largely demolished apart from the towers in the early 1990s).
However, local architectural practice Johns, Slater Haward were responsible for some excellent structures that survive today to adorn the Borough. At a time when brutalism and modernism were fashionable, the firm of Johns, Slater Haward designed buildings of real character, with a jauntiness that looked back to the Festival of Britain, and forward towards the post-modernism of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
Their major buildings in the Borough included Ipswich Civic College (now Suffolk College), Castle Hill United Reformed Church, Harvest House (HQ building fo Fisons, now a business centre), Suffolk House (now AXA Insurance), Colchester Road fire station, and the East Anglian Daily Times building.
They also designed a number of schools for Ipswich Borough Council, which had responsibility for education in the Borough before 1974. The best of these, and a building of national significance, was the group known as Sprites Schools, today converted into a single primary school.
Sprites Schools was designed as a sequence of linked glass pavilions set in a field. The roofs are hyperbolic, curving to low and high points at the corners. Low, structural brick walls do not intrude. Wooden framing for the windows divides the glass walls into pleasing rectangles. Paths and grassed areas were arranged in parallel to walls to create another layer of lines leading to secluded courtyards. The sculptor Bernard Reynolds, responsible for a number of public artworks in the Borough, created reliefs that give a lively feel to the structural walls. When lit up at light, the pavilions were intended to appear like a caravan in the desert.
Unusually for buildings of the time, the schools were intended to mature, with trees growing to surround the pavilions and create a woodland effect. Sir Niklaus Pevsner, in The Buildings of England, admired Sprites Schools greatly, and they are the only post-war school in the county to appear in his Suffolk volume. The overall design has withstood the test of time, although, as with many late 1950s and early 1960s buildings, the schools were created for a low-fuel-price economy, and the lower and upper parts of most of the glass walls have now been filled in to save costs on heating and ventilation.
Addition of a nursery in 1995 celebrated and enhanced the original architecture, but conversion to a single school by Suffolk County Council in 2004 created an uneasy linkage that spoils the openness the main inner courtyard. Even so, the sheer exuberance of the original buildings survives. They are best seen from Hawthorn Drive across the playing fields, especially when lit up on a late winter afternoon.