ABSTRACT
The late nineteenth century was a germinal period in the development of, on the face of it, three barely connected social and economic phenomena: popular education, urban transport systems, and domestic music. But these, with other influences, converged to shape the early fortunes of a London board school, Fleet Road, located on the south-eastern fringe of Hampstead. Just over 20 years before the school was built, the Newcastle Commission had been established (1858) to report on the state of popular education. At that time it was still characterized as ‘the education of the poor’, a very broad mass of the population regarded as generally negative in attitude towards schooling. The Commissioners were soon made aware not only of the inexactness of this notion, but also of a burgeoning demand from much less than poor groups in the population for adequate educational provision for their children. Perhaps HMI Morell jumped the gun when he claimed, in a paper read to the United Association of Schoolmasters of Great Britain in 1859:
I think, my friends, that it should be a subject of special gratification, particularly to a company of teachers, that we live in what may be emphatically termed the age of popular education.2
