Coventry’s Shame! |
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| These pages are devoted to Historic Buildings and areas of Coventry that are suffering from neglect or ill treatment. | |||||||
The Old Grammar School |
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| This wonderful part of Coventry’s history is being allowed to decay at an alarming rate. You can’t help but feel that if this building had been in another city it would have been maintained and used as a tourist attraction, not left to deteriorate until nothing can be done and then happily demolished and forgotten. It has already been damaged by arsonists and threatened by road widening plans.How much longer can it survive? | |||||||
The Old Grammar School was built circa 1340 as a chapel for the 12th Century St John the Baptist Hospital. The Hospital was a victim of the dissolution of the monasteries. Then in 1545 it was turned into a grammar school by John Hales. The pupils used choir stalls moved from Whitefriars church as desks. It survived as a school for about 300 years then came under threat when the school moved and was only saved by public subscription. Shouldn’t the Old Grammar School have been restored as part of the Phoenix Development? Millions have been spent on building windswept squares, how about spending money on keeping our past alive? |
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Photo shows the interior of the Old Grammar School in Hales Street, including the choir stalls moved from Whitefriars church, many bearing the graffiti of bored students from hundreds of years ago. This photo was taken during and open day a few years ago. |
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| © J Hewitt Family Researcher | |||||||