There’s something counter-intuitive about exposing ‘delicate’ children to the elements, come rain, come shine: (1)
Sometimes, when we got there in the morning the snow would have blown in on to the tables and chairs and we would have to clear it off before we could start.
But by all accounts, it did Norman Collier, a pupil at the Aspen House Open Air School in Streatham in the 1930s, ‘the world of good’.
The school was opened by the London County Council in 1925 for pupils described at the time as ‘pre-tuberculous’ – children who were anaemic, asthmatic or malnourished. It was the fifth of the LCC’s open-air schools. The first had been opened in Bostall Wood in Woolwich on land donated by the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society in 1907. But it was the first built to the council’s ‘improved design’ which would go on to be used in fourteen…
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Old School Garden 