Robert Campbell-Roscoe | Lancaster University
There is a corner of an English field that will be forever foreign; that this field is a state comprehensive school, where I was principal from 2007 to 2016, is perhaps even more surprising. The genesis of the building of Impington Village College, a secondary school three miles from the centre of Cambridge, brought together, through a series of extraordinary and occasionally unfortunate events, two eccentric but progressive misfits, one English, one German. Its design and construction have been celebrated since, with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner describing it as ‘one of the best buildings of its date in England, if not the best’ and the Twentieth Century Society selecting it as the1939 architectural entry for its ‘100 Buildings, 100 Years’ celebration. How did this incredible occurrence come about?
Although initially separated by culture and geography, ‘Harry’ and ‘Wally’ shared remarkably similar journeys. Henry Morris (Cambridgeshire’s chief education officer from 1922 to 1954) and Walter Gropius (founder of the Bauhaus school) were born six years apart, both serving as junior officers on opposing sides during the First World War before launching their progressive and decidedly modern views on education, learning and living in the early 1920s. Events in Germany in the 1930s would finally see them collaborating in 1935 to create a legacy for children and families ever since.
Gropius, the elder of the two, first came to the fore in 1919. In the aftermath of the First World War, the German state, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, wanted to create a single unified school of applied and fine arts and Gropius, then an architect based in Berlin, was appointed. He articulated that the new body be known as the Staatliches Bauhaus (Bauhaus State School with the word ‘bauhaus’ to mean literally ‘building house’). Aligned with this was a stirring vision for a new way of merging both applied and fine arts and creating, through architecture, buildings (and hence ways of living) that combined the best practices of the arts, especially painting, sculpture, design and architecture, and which would inspire social and communal living and spiritual uplift.
The school enjoyed modest success and impact. However, its residency in Weimar came under threat, and an opportunity arose for a new location in Dessau and with it, a fresh and bespoke design, which Gropius himself would undertake. The new building would be a living testimony to the Bauhaus vision, housing workshops that would be described as ‘laboratories of art’, with a balanced command of technology and design. Foundations were laid in 1925, and the building opened the following year as a beacon to the school and its associated movement. Looking at the design nearly a hundred years after its conception, its fluency and beauty appear ageless.
In the same year that Gropius designed the Bauhaus building, Henry Morris was publishing his ‘Memorandum’, in which he outlined a model for a new type of schooling which would be constructed across rural Cambridgeshire.
Morris’s elevation to a senior role for education in the shire was relatively swift. He had completed his degree at Cambridge and then progressed to work in Kent as a ‘learner’ on a scheme where bright young men were introduced to educational administration. From there, he was initially appointed Assistant Secretary for Education back in Cambridgeshire’s Shire Hall, only to be elevated to County Education Secretary (i.e. what became Chief Education Officer following the 1944 Education Act) in 1922.
Whilst Cambridge may have been home to one of the premier universities in the world, the rest of the shire in the 1920s was small and poor. At that time, the shire was much smaller than it is today (so excluding Huntingdonshire and the Isle of Ely and beyond) and therefore, apart from Cambridge, there were no towns, just a series of relatively isolated villages. Education was patchy and varied from settlement to settlement. Typically, teachers were not qualified. The buildings that housed children were often dark, unsanitary and cold. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given these dismal conditions, attendance was poor, often as low as fifty per cent. Any brighter pupils (mostly male) were lured into Cambridge and its grammar school provision. Morris’s ground-breaking solution was the ‘village college’.
Published in 1925, his ‘Memorandum’ is a breathtaking read unlike anything of its kind written since in education. For Morris, the ‘village college’ would be the antithesis of ‘school’ (with its damning association with just children). According to Morris, there would be no dismal dispute between academic and vocational learning and no leaving the village college (until one reached ‘extreme old age’). The college would partner with the family in synthesising all aspects of rural life. It would be an organic whole for its community, with facilities and learning for young and old alike. It would be a living vision of the ‘never-ceasingness’ of education. For conservative and deprived Cambridgeshire, it was a gripping and innovative solution.
Given the economic and cultural circumstances of the 1920s, the struggle to adopt the village college model was far more dramatic than its inception or design. As one of the key partners in the delivery of education in England, the church had to be assuaged (and in Cambridgeshire, it was responsible for three times as many all-age schools as the county). Morris’s solution was ingenious – the Cambridgeshire Agreed Syllabus of Religious Instruction (created by a committee representing Christian faiths and institutions), which laid down the specificities for teaching religion in schools. This breakthrough later became the norm for all counties and authorities as part of the 1944 Education Act and is still in place today. Other challenges were more predictable, such as how to afford to build this chain of village colleges for Cambridgeshire. Morris became an ' expert beggar ' in the words of his friend and biographer, Harry Rée.
Consequently, it was not until 1930 that the first village college in Sawston was opened. Its design and buildings reflected the conservatism of the county, with one commentator suggesting its neo-Georgian architecture was almost colonial in design, which is hardly a worthy feature for such an innovative and modern institution. Fortunately for Morris, Walter Gropius was finding life in Hitler’s Germany a greater challenge, and he was to arrive in Britain on an extended visit in 1934. A mutual acquaintance, Jack Pritchard, recognised the accord in the two men and introduced them to each other. Crucially, Pritchard had studied engineering at Cambridge and was fascinated with the architectural possibilities of new materials, such as metals and glass, just as Gropius had been exploring through the Bauhaus.
Gropius had been initially disappointed with architectural opportunities in Britain, where modernism (and perhaps its continental European flavour) was disliked and misunderstood. In one letter home, Gropius described most British designs as ‘homey’. 1935 saw the publication in English for the first time of The New Architecture and The Bauhaus. Whilst it hardly became endeared to Britain, it had its enthusiasts, including Henry Morris.
Morris identified Gropius (and a British architect, Maxwell Fry, who was getting to know the German) as his preferred architects for what became his favourite village college project: Impington. Yet the route to construction was stormy. Chivers & Sons (fruiters and farmers) had gifted land adjacent to its founding farm, and Morris had gained sufficient funds to build the college. However, other local villages were resentful of Impington, and the county councillors were resistant to Gropius (as he was both German and costly). They asked why the county architect could not be employed to do the same work. For Morris, the village college (and ideally the one at Impington) should be:
“…well-designed and equipped and beautifully decorated will exercise their potent, but unspoken, influence on those who use them from day to day. This is true education.”
He persisted and got his man, and the college was built, opening for its first cohort of pupils, somewhat ironically, in the first week of September 1939. As Britain and Germany declared war, Cambridgeshire children were about to enter the most ambitious and modern school building in Britain, designed by a German architect.
The buildings have been praised and adored since. For Herbert Read, critic and artist, they provided an educative environment whilst for Paul Reilly (architectural critic for the Manchester Guardian) they were clean, elegant and of social and aesthetic importance (whilst remaining largely unknown for many notables attending the city university). In 1967, Bryan Robertson asserted that in commissioning Gropius, Henry Morris had made history in English education.
Impington is Gropius and Morris’s triumph in Cambridgeshire and indeed Britian. Even before its opening, Gropius had been lured to America and Harvard University by a more modern-thinking and ambitious culture. Henry Morris would struggle to gain anyone as prestigious as Gropius for the remaining village colleges. Indeed, a plinth for Henry Moore’s Family Group statue remains bare at the front of Impington as the county council refused to fund the purchase of the sculpture. It now lives over the border in Hertfordshire on the lawn of Barclay School, Stevenage.
Designed ninety years ago, Impington remains the pinnacle of British modernism (certainly in terms of school buildings) and has been an inspiration ever since. The village college remains a proud embodiment of liberal, progressive education. It was only the second British state school (in 1992) to adopt the International Baccalaureate (IB) as its main academic programme for its sixth form and has recently introduced the IB’s Middle Years Programme, normally the domain of selective international schools. It boasts two dance studios (a feature that would be heartily approved by Gropius himself who ensured the place of dance as part of the Bauhaus) and offers multiple language options for its students (including Latin and Japanese). Yet its students are permitted to wear jeans and trainers and shorts in summer, a quirky and eccentric antithesis of many secondary schools where uniforms are rigid and austere. Most fittingly, given its remarkable genesis, it was recognised by The Sunday Times (in its Parent Power survey) as its 2025 Comprehensive School of the Year.
Further reading:
Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 1965)
Fiona MacCarthy, Walter Gropius (Faber & Faber, 2019)
Harry Rée, Educator Extraordinary: The Life and Achievement of Henry Morris (Peter Owen, 1985)
David Rooney, Henry Morris: The Cambridgeshire Village Colleges and Community Education (The Henry Morris Memorial Trust, 2013)
Robert Campbell-Roscoe is a full-time PhD researcher in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, writing a novel of short-stories exploring masculinities in a deprived coastal community. He records and releases music and publishes poetry as ‘Jack Roscoe’. He has previously studied at Loughborough and Cambridge Universities and, from 2007 to 2016, was the Principal of Impington Village College.