The Old Aston School - Prince Albert

The Library/ Computer Suite pictures and text were used at Leuven to explore the changes taking place over time in the school and the complicated way in which the events of the last thirty years have to be explained to outsiders by a teacher who can remember the changes to the space.

The two pictures were taken from nearly the same spot - the first looking West and the second looking North. The room is on the first floor of the original main building. In the first picture the the internal corridor is on the left and the outside playground on the right.

In the original school plan, in the 1880s, this space would have been part of a room, designated a schoolroom; schoolrooms were common before this time as rooms in which large groups of children could be taught by monitors etc Even in the 1880s, it was suggested in devising school plans that schools should contain schoolrooms as well as the new idea of the classrooms. In either picture it very hard to discern the original school features as a hundred years of ësatisficingí or altering the school by its owners and related employees have rendered the original invisible.

"This room was a classroom which is now the computer suite it was used as a stockroom at one time. Where we are, there was a door and there are toilets and a corridor. All this was 3 classrooms but in between the 3 classrooms there was again these big rollers that went up so that the whole upstairs could open up and be used as one big hall. I had that classroom at one time, this was a nice big class room, the only thing was that if you went through you had to walk through every class room if you wanted to go out of the class at the end you had to walk through 2 classes to get to it and the same with this class here but people did., they walked up this way and into the classes that way rather than through these doors so virtually had the 6 classrooms upstairs.

Sometimes these things were open and at one time in the 60s this one wasnít used and there was big hallway for wet playtimes and the children sat here."

The new main entrance to the school, on the ground floor, has had a complex history. Again, these great changes, even within professional memory [a shorter notion than living memory if it is related to school lives] make a simple description for the outsider very difficult. Imagine this.

"This is where thereís been a tremendous change - there was a corridor through there, a stockroom here, a tiny little creche hall here and outside just here this lotís been built on but on the other side there was a glass verandah in which we kept plants. There was an archway here to go through and you could come in, no this was actually blocked. You came in through that doorway there, through that archway out here and out through doors like that. This wasnít here, this was just a stockroom and a cloakroom and then, what weíve got here was just a classroom. All this area from here down which is the headteacherís room was just toilets and this room here was the biggest classroom in the school. I had this , with high ceilings. It was a beautiful classroom, it was at one time."