ABSTRACT
Lauriston School is in Hackney, in north-east London, and started off as a Victorian board school, but it was rebuilt in the 1970s as a single-storey, modernist building. The Victorian buildings were used as educational-authority storage before being sold off for conversion into apartments in the 1990s. For the new Lauriston, completed in 2010, the staff and governors set a clear vision intended to capture the best of the previous schools' qualities, their 'Lauriston-ness', while relieving them from the struggle against inadequate space, poor-quality fabric, woeful lack of acoustic control, dismal environmental conditions, with classrooms that overheated in summer and were too cold in winter, and an excessively internalised space, with limited connections to street and city. The flexible, creative learning environment of the new Lauriston has proved highly successful: the clusters provide smaller-scale learning bases within the larger school.
