Buildings
GROVE HALL
1899-1904
This was previously a Church in Saffrons Road comprising a large hall (nave) with a slightly raised platform at one end (chancel) and two adjoining small rooms (the vestries). The accommodation was adequate while pupil numbers remained low, but they had increased to 100 by 1903.
The Head later reported “that all classes were held in one room; if anyone entered his ears would be assailed by a medley of French and Latin phrases, (not always accurately pronounced) geometrical and geographical terms, whilst his nose would be affected by odours arising from chemical experiments”.
TECHNICAL INSTITUTE
1904-1919
EVERSLEY COURT
1919-1962
This very large building built on a hilltop site to the north of the Town Centre was bought for £9,250 by the Borough Council who spent an extra £4,500 on adaptations and furnishing. First built as an Edwardian family home it became a prep school (Ascham) which located elsewhere and Royal Navy Air Service quarters during the World War 1. An inspection by the Board of Education commended the wisdom of the Council “who had provided beautiful surroundings conducive not only to good health but to better work”!
In the absence of specialist facilities, the timetable had to be constructed to allow boys to travel to the Art School and the ‘old’ Science labs in the Technical Institute. In due course small extensions provided a Gymnasium and Workshop and a Library and Art Room developed internally. However, there were no facilities for Science Labs or an Assembly Hall until 1930, when a new wing was constructed and according to the Head “the Labs were admirably planned and equipped whilst the Hall, although not as large as we would have wished, was acoustically perfect”.
Games still took place at Hampden Park and a playground (and drill square) was provided by asphalting over a grass area; the other grass area was ‘out of bounds’ and provided an attractive area with mature trees as the backdrop.
An article that appeared in Observer, the quarterly journal of the Eastbourne Society, in 2010, is based on a recollection of Nicholas Howell, who was an art student & lecturer at Eversley Court.
Click the button below to read the full article: "Eversley Court Remembered"
HITCHIN
July 1940-December 1942
KING’S DRIVE
1962-1975/77
At the end of the War Eversley Court, once occupied with such delight, was becoming increasingly shabby and the facilities (small rooms, narrow corridors, outdated specialist facilities and no sports field on site) were considered inadequate for the new era of Secondary education following the 1944 Act. An inspection report in the early 1950s praised the working of the School but severely criticised the premises and inadequate conditions in which that work had to be done.
Following some years’ deliberation, a new site on completely open land off King’s Drive was approved in January 1957. Here for the very first time the School was housed in purpose-built premises, built in two stages, and officially opened in 1962, although as rooms became available teaching was gradually transferred there over a period of eighteen months previously.
The splendid new facilities surrounded by sports fields were enjoyed until amalgamation with the Girls High School in 1975 meant the end of the boys-only Grammar School after 76 years. With the beginning of the system of Comprehensive secondary education in the Eastbourne, the King’s Drive premises served as the town’s Sixth Form College from 1977 to 1993; the premises were then incorporated into a college developed on an adjacent site to provide a full range of post-16 education. A video taken inside and above the King's Drive site when it was open to visitors prior to the Flagstaff Ceremony on 6th November 2021 can be viewed below:
EVERSLEY COURT
Remembered
This recollection is based on an article that appeared in Observer, the quarterly journal of the Eastbourne Society, in 2010 supplemented by information gleaned from local newspaper reports. The author of the Observer piece, Nicholas Howell, had been an art student at Eversley Court for four years in the 1970s and returned as a lecturer in 1999.
It is ten years since Eversley Court in St Anne’s Road was demolished to make way for a development of flats with the same name built by Berkeley Homes. Eversley Court was built in 1895 and started life as an Edwardian family home before being extended in 1902 to house Ascham School. The latter was one of a number of preparatory schools established in Eastbourne in the last two decades of the nineteenth century; Ascham was a boarding school and at Eversley Court had masters’ bedrooms and dormitories for the 50 boarders on the first floor.
The building was set on a four-acre site on one of the highest points in the town being situated near to South Lynn, the former boys’ school, on the north and the reservoir on the west. The building was entered through a brick and tiled porch into a large reception hall with a fine oak staircase. At the half landing there was a magnificent stained-glass window. Opening on to a balcony. Leading off the reception hall were three large rooms, two of which had arched inglenook fireplaces and deep bay windows with seats overlooking the wooded and lawned grounds.
In 1919 Eversley Court became home to the Eastbourne Municipal Secondary School, later to be renamed as Eastbourne Grammar School, and during the 1920s it was vastly extended to include a new wing housing additional classrooms and a theatre with a proscenium arch.
The Grammar School relocated to a new building in King’s Drive in 1962 and Eversley Court then became the Eastbourne School of Art. The art school had previously occupied temporary premises in Upperton Road following the bombing in 1941 of the Technical Institute (an early home of the Municipal Secondary School) on the site of the Library in Grove Road. It was late renamed as Eastbourne College of Art and Design and subsequently subsumed within Eastbourne College of Arts and Technology (ECAT).
By 1998, following a Government inspection which criticised the Eversley Court site, a decision was made to relocate the art college to the main ECAT campus at Cross Levels Way. Despite a bitter protest campaign by college staff and the local community, the fate of Eversley Court was sealed: planning permission was narrowly passed by the full Town Council for the construction of apartments on the site and for a new building on the ECAT campus. The latter was smaller, had less studio space and had fewer attractive facilities than Eversley Court; added to this, it was thought by some that the old site had been sold below its potential value.
Although Eversley Court was demolished in 2000, not all was lost as the stained-glass window from the landing was saved and incorporated into the new college building; the installation was overseen by Douglas Clowes, the former site architect. In addition, the design of the new flats retained something of the feel of the old building: the carved brick frieze from the porch of Eversley Court was salvaged and incorporated into two porches in the new development while the lodge house was refurbished and the gate posts were retained.