Recent Developments

St Paul’s Cathedral School Estates Project Increases Capacity and Improves Faculties for All Pupils

The School has recently completed an £8 million investment in its estate. The stimulus for building a new boarding house, which was the first phase of the project, was the need to provide compliant accommodation to reflect current regulations, and the desire to exceed the expectations of the families whose children are choristers in one of the world’s great choirs. In so doing, the new building is part of a strategy to secure the culturally significant English Choral tradition long into the future.

The accommodation, running over two floors, includes 36 beds configured in groups of six, common rooms currently configured as a games room and cinema room, bathrooms, plus ample quiet social spaces. It is situated on the ancient site of the nave of St Augustine’s church and conjoins two of the school’s existing buildings, one of which is the Grade 1 listed tower of St Augustine’s church, now fully integrated into the school’s free flow management of children.

Materials are entirely sympathetic to the existing school which, designed in the 1960s, is a modernist interpretation of the aesthetics of St Paul’s Cathedral. Features of the new accommodation includes underfloor heating and air flow management, as well as sound proofed window sets.

Fully maximizing a constrained space, the building is on pillars, creating a partly covered play area adding to a completely redesigned and enlarged play space that includes a roof top quiet area. The enlargement of the play spaces with rubber crumb surface throughout are light and airy, secure, safe and fully contained within the school’s site. The space also includes a green wall and other planting. These features have a positive environmental impact as well as being aesthetically pleasing.

The new boarding accommodation is the central element to a three phase redevelopment of the school’s estate. This includes substantially better residential staff accommodation, more classrooms, a discrete ICT suite, an enlarged and refitted dining hall and kitchen and bespoke play equipment in the form of a suspended abstract boat. These elements combined have increased the school’s capacity and we are now meeting the needs of increasing numbers of London parents wanting to educate their children at St Paul’s Cathedral School.

Final funding for the development was made possible through generous donations of benefactors, friends and parents to whom we are eternally grateful. You can read about the development in full detail here in the Architects Journal. 

Architects Journal