W'ton Royal School 'saving'

The development program for the Royal Wolverhampton School, originally estimated at about £100, 000 has been cut to £71,000, by combining two blocks into one. The foundation stone of the new building is to be laid by the Mayor of Wolverhmpton, Alderman E.Y. Fullwood, on May 14.

An appeal fund, recently launched by the Governors of the school for £75,000 for the new buildings, will now include the cost of a new playing field in Goldthorn Road as well. So far, £43,000 has been donated or promised. The £71,000 includes the cost of furniture and fittings.

The saving has been made by combining the planned science block and dining hall into one building, with a square footage of about 12,000, on the main school site, but with an entrance in Goldthorn Road, not Penn Road. The new building will link up with catering houses nearby. The block will have two dining halls - a family dining room for the younger boys, and a self-service refectory dinning room for the sixth formers. On the same floor there will be a kitchen.

On the first floor, two chemistry laboratories, two physics laboratories, and preparation rooms are planned. The existing science rooms will become the biology department. The new laboratories will eventually link up with adjoining workshops.

Architects for the scheme are Butler, Wones and Partners, Wolverhampton.

23 September 1968

Royal School's £60,000 new block

A modern building system has enabled extensions at the Royal Wolverhampton School costing over £60,000 to be completed in just five months. The building was built on the C.L.A.S.P. principle of prefabricated wall and roof units erected on to a light steel frame.

Ready for use when the senior pupils returned to school at the weekend was a large hall providing dining accommodation for 200 boys and their masters. A two-storey block, linked to the dining hall, was also ready for use. This houses a smaller self-service dining room for the sixth-form pupils, a kitchen, toilet and store accommodation on the ground floor. On the first floor is a lavatory block, comprising physics and chemistry laboratories and a preparation room.

The extensions were built to allow the school to increase the number of its pupils as allowed under a new constitution of 1964. Last Autumn, the board of governors decided a building must be constructed to allow this expansion, preferably by September of this year. Sketched schemes were examined but it was not until the middle of January that the board chose a building using the C.L.A.S.P. principle, on the grounds of price and speed of completion. The contractors were on the site in the middle of April.

C.L.A.S.P. or the Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme was established in July, 1957 at a meeting between interested local authorities and the then Minister of Education. The local authorities had joined together to obtain the benefits from pooling knowledge gained in their building programmes.

Flexible

The original idea behind a C.L.A.S.P-built building is that it should be flexible and be able to move with underground subsidence, without severe damage to the structure. This does not, of course apply in the Royal School’s case. Three basic ideas are incorporated into such a building: rocker bases on the stanchions, sprung races between them, and articulated staircases. These three devices are applied to a building erected on a flexible concrete raft with different segments independently steel-linked.

The idea for C.L.A.S.P. was first put forward by Sir Donald Gibson, controller general at the Ministry of Public Building and Works and formerly Nottinghamshire county architect. So much interest has since been shown in C.L.A.S.P. school and non-educational buildings for local authorities that arrangements have been made for the system to be made available for private use.

System

This is how the Royal Wolverhampton School managed to get its building programme into the system. A spokesman for Butler Wones and Partners the architects who designed the extensions said: “A building of this size, cost and complexity, constructed by traditional methods, could have taken around a year to erect. By using this system, working drawings and tenders were completed in about two and a half months, and time on site by the general contractors was approximately five-months.”

23 March 1990

£1M DAMAGE AS FIRE HITS TOP SCHOOL

A £1 million blaze at an historic public school in Wolverhampton has destroyed kitchen and science blocks. Explosions form chemistry and physics labs tore the roof of the building. At the height of the blaze more than 100 firemen fought to contain the flames. The prefabricated building at the Royal Wolverhampton School in Penn Road, turned into a fireball when crews ran out of water for a crucial four-minute period.

One man said the building reached ‘flash-point’ as firemen struggled to maintain a failing water supply, and then it erupted in a sheet of flames. “It was incredible, within a matter of minutes the fire turned into an inferno and became completely out of control”, he said.

Exams

Magazines of live ammunition used by school cadets had to be removed by firemen from a nearby storage block and dozens of boarders were evacuated. The blaze raged for more than two hours, and explosions from the first floor science blocks could be heard in nearby Goldthorn Road. Staff and pupils watched helplessly as the block burned, destroying valuable equipment and exam classwork by more than 50 pupils.

Headmaster Mr Peter Gorring said: “This is a major blow, we have lost all our chemistry and physics classrooms and kitchens. Our first priority is to find somewhere for the children to continue lessons and to see what we can do about lost exam work.”

It is believed that the fire started in a section of the ground floor kitchens, and fire investigation teams were today trying to pinpoint the cause. Station Officer John Morris, of Merridale fire station, said the first crews arrived shortly after 8pm and found the building heavily smoke- logged. “Four men were inside the science block but they could not find the seat of the fire, although the heat was intense," he said. "Then our water supply failed and during the few minutes it took to restore the fire took hold."

Two Wolverhampton firemen, David Simpson and Jack Tinsley, were taken to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation. The two storey building called Clarence House, was opened in 1968 by the Queen Mother. Superintendent John Carter, of Birmingham Road police, said the blaze is not thought to have been started deliberately. "We are still investigating but at this stage it looks as if it was probably an accident of some kind," he said.

The school's assistant catering manager, Mr Colin Cooke, said he was the last person to leave the block before the fire started. "I locked up at about 7:40 pm and certainly there appeared to be nothing wrong," he added.

The senior school will be closed until Monday but classes at the junior school on the other side of Penn Road are continuing as normal.