Hidden among prefabricated industrial units there is a nursery school that often gets forgotten about. It seems like an odd location for a nursery, next to a storage company and opposite a waste transfer station with ambitions to expand.
For the headteacher of St Philips Marsh Nursery School, it seems the other way around - an odd location for so many factories to place their buildings around a school which has been part of the community for almost 100 years. After waiting for 13 long years, what was then an infant school was finally completed in 1926.
According to records, during the grand opening of the school by Reverend Bennett Banks, he called the school “the most up to date infant school in the country”. But he expressed his mixed feelings about what was then the first school in the country to be built in the veranda style.
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The 1918 Education Act paved the way for changes which led to an increase in state funding and for the first time, schooling was compulsory for all children up until age 14. By the 1920s there were major changes in the structure of primary education with the creation of separate infant and junior schools.
St Philips, when it first opened, was an infant school which catered to children from the ages of five to seven years old. The Reverend felt at a loss as the new state funded school would replace the church in providing education for the poor in what was then the parish of St Philip and Jacob.
The Education Act and subsequent reforms saw nursery provision and regular health inspections as well as the start of class sizes being limited to thirty. The log book from all those years ago still sits in the office of St Philips Marsh Nursery School and provides a historical record of what schools were like for children growing up in the area all those years ago.
During the Second World War the school remained open but the impact of the war was felt at times. At the end of November 1940, the school was shut for three days due to ‘unexploded bombs that lay neat’. Then in February 1941 there were nine children who left the school as part of the evacuation programme.
In the 1960s the tight-knit community, built upon what is effectively an island, were uprooted and dispersed across the city. Many of them were housed in Barton Hill and Knowle, but many families from those areas still attended the school.
Simon Holmes, who has been the headteacher of the school for the last 15 years, said: “This was very poor, high density terrace housing. Then in the 1960s there was a slum clearance, the demolished all the housing but they left the school behind.
“Families were moved to Knowle and Barton Hill and there weren’t any school places so the children came back. Ever since then it has been a very popular nursery, with the grandchildren and the great grandchildren of the people who came back.”
The reunions that took place on the Marsh during the early 1980s led to the creation of ‘Yesterday’s Island’, a musical comedy based on the life and times of St Philips Marsh from 1926-1956. The play devised by Brian Davis and written and produced by John Scully was first shown at the Bristol Hippodrome in 1984 was the first amateur show to make a profit and be invited back for an ‘extended run’ when the show returned in 1987.
Brian Davies, who was instrumental in the creation of the sell-out play, was born on the Marsh and lived there until the 1960s. He lived on Grafton Street with his mother and nine brothers. As part of the Marsh story, completed in September 2021, he spoke of his life growing up.
Brian said: “We lived top to tail so three people slept on one end of one bed, three slept in the other, and the youngest two for years slept with my mother and father, and we often wondered how they ever made any children. But we realised it was to do with Sunday school.
“And my dad died when I was seven and my mother was left with 10 boys from 18 down to a baby with the whole street wondering how she was going to manage and she did. It was special growing up there because nobody had much money and nobody boasted and you never really went out of the area.”
Roger Packer, who was born in St Philips Marsh in 1941 and has previously been a nursery governor, spoke on the Marsh story of his experiences attending the school that still exists today: “They used to make me eat swede and I hated swede and one day I’d had enough and I ran away. I hope they keep the nursery school in St Philips Marsh which was my school.”
Current headteacher Mr Holmes also spoke in the recent history project of how the school has always been the centre of the Marsh community: “For many years the nursery has been a focal point. Historically this has been a housing area. It’s been a poor area… but the community support was the spirit of the Marsh as they call it.
“There’s always been a saying amongst the people that the spirit of the school brings people back to the Marsh.” Mr Holmes also said that he would “like the nursery school to be the centre of the new development".
Over the last five years former St Philips Marsh residents have joined with the nursery, local businesses and residents in neighbouring communities to create a vision for the future of the area set to be in the centre of the Temple Quarter Development. Although Covid has resulted in delays on both sides, with the recent approval for neighbourhood plan funding, the hope to restore the spirit of the marsh has been revived.
Mr Holmes hopes that they will be given a voice and the investment coming into the area will be in line with the vision held by those who once lived in some of the first council houses built in Bristol. The development also opens up the opportunity for new council homes for surrounding communities in desperate need of affordable housing.
He added: “There’s still a very strong St Philips Marsh group of older people who lived here for years and have been fighting for the redevelopment of the Marsh. They’ve had their own vision for how it should be and they’ve actually talked to the people at the Temple Quarter Development about it and some of the ideas that are coming up are the ideas that these people have had for 40 or 50 years.
“The one thing that everybody’s saying is that this area should be redeveloped for affordable housing. So many families are living in overcrowded flats with very little green spaces.
“This is a real opportunity for Bristol to develop a community here in a new way which is inclusive. This has been a community where people have lived for hundreds of years.”
The infant school, which was completed almost 100 years ago and converted into a nursery school in 1965, still serves the surrounding neighbourhoods of Barton Hill and Brislington and is one of the few state funded nurseries remaining in the area.
As national funding cuts to early education have created uncertainty for nurseries which are run to meet the needs of the community rather than to generate profits, Mr Holmes hopes they can continue to support the community for another 100 years: “It’s a lovely place and we want to be here for another 100 years.”
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