My old high school Trace Mann

When I was in Year 6, I passed the eleven plus which meant I went to a grammar school.  I went to St Martin In The Fields High School for Girls, which was also the school that my two paternal aunts went to.  It was founded by the parish of St Martin In the Fields in 1699 as a charity.  It began its life in Charing Cross and as it started to grow in size it was decided that it would relocate to Tulse Hill in 1928 which is where it has remained to this day.
The first girl I met on my very first day I am still friends with now, along with another ten girls who were also in my form, and we get to meet up with each other as much as we can.
We can remember every single girl that was in our form, and when we had the register taken at the start of the day we all had a number.  So instead of the teacher reading out our names, we in turn shouted out our number in turn.  My number was 14.
I can remember my first day as if it were yesterday.  The classroom seemed enormous and the weather was cold but very very sunny.  The sun was streaming through the extremely large windows.  We all had the same timetable and it was written on the board and we had to copy it into our book.  We only had one chance with this as once it was removed from the board that was it, we never saw it again.  We did not have the luxury of printed timetables or timetables emailed home as we were pre-emails back then.
I am so proud of my old school, and wanted to share with you some pictures. 

 This is the front of the school

 This is the ceiling of the front reception hall

  This where our school was founded in 1699

  This is one of the staircases in the school.  Look at the detail in the spindles

 This is the view looking back at the main front door of the school.  The school office is to the left hand side in this picture, it looks like that student is going there

 This is the welcoming as you walk through the front door.  This is not a mat, it is actually painted directly onto the flooring

 This is another view from the main entrance.  The music rooms were on the balcony above

  This was the traffic light system outside the Headmistress's office.  You were pretty scared if you were sent there, dreading the light to change to enter.  Her office was enormous.  It had massive windows and her desk was huge.  She had a couple of sofas in there too in front of a big inglenook fireplace. 

  This is the view looking back down to the entrance hall from the balcony where the music rooms were

 These are the two main classroom corridors in the school.  We had some other classrooms which were in an annex at the end of each of the corridors.  There was the green corridor and the blue corridor. My favourite corridor was the blue one.  The classrooms were only on the right hand side of the corridors. The Main Hall was opposite the classrooms on the left hand side in the green corridor

  One of the music rooms

  Another view showing the lovely architecture

Author:  Trace Mann