Prince Henry’s Grammar School Refurbishment and New Build Sixth Form Facilities – Leeds

Prince Henry’s Grammar School

Otley, Leeds, West Yorkshire

Prince Henry’s Grammar School is a 1400 pupil secondary school and sixth form within a conservation area in Otley. The school moved to the present site in 1923 when the original stone clad two-storey double courtyard building, was constructed.

Bowman Riley worked with Prince Henry’s to facilitate their vision of becoming internationally recognised as a successful learning community that provides outstanding education. Working collaboratively with the school, we appraised the estate and produced a strategic development plan to enable future projects to be delivered on an incremental basis as the funding became available with the emphasis on creating an identity and hub for its sixth form students.

This resulted in funding secured from the Academies Capital Maintenance Fund to undertake a full refurbishment of the historic building. We designed and project managed significant improvements including: roofing maintenance, stonework repairs, replacing the remaining wooden windows, refurbishing the clock tower and internal modernisation. This investment brought the historic building up to date and reduced the need to use a significant portion of the school’s annual budget to patch repair the building. The refurbishment acted as an enabling project for the building of a new sixth form hub.

To accommodate the new sixth form facilities, we designed the 600m2 infill of an existing courtyard providing a central flexible hub with a café and meeting room. This central device improved connections with series of adjacent spaces namely the halls, classrooms, art rooms and two new teaching spaces.

The scheme presented multiple challenges, linking to the historical part of the school. The design was required within extremely tight timescales to ensure that the school complied with the constraints of the bid conditions for funding.