This page is one of several pages which are based on articles in our book entitled Royal Leamington Spa, A History in 100 Buildings which was published in 2018 and is no longer in print.
The Grade II* listed building at No 27 Binswood Avenue, which was known as Binswood Hall when it was part of North Leamington School, is now known as Audley Binswood, and offers well-appointed residential accommodation for older people. It was designed by the local architect Daniel Squirhill and when opened in 1847/48 it was the first purpose-built school in Leamington. Apart from a brief period as a convent before the First World War, it was always an educational establishment. In a town replete with Regency architecture, it comes as something of a surprise to stumble on this fine Tudor façade just a short distance from The Parade.
Originally founded south of the river in Eastnor Grove in 1844 as the Warwickshire Proprietary College, the aims of the first school on the site were to provide ‘for the sons of the nobility, clergy and gentry, a sound classical and mathematical education in accordance with the principles of the established church’. The present site was purchased for £840 and Dr Henry Jephson was the principal donor, a role he maintained throughout his life. It was Jephson who laid the foundation stone when it opened on August 1st, 1848 and it was his arms that were later adopted as those of the college.
In its early years, the College was hamstrung by financial difficulties due in part to the very restrictive admissions policy. Headmasters came and went and the school closed several times for lengthy periods. It became a public school in 1851 and in 1855 the College Rules were amended to allow the sons of tradesmen to be admitted for the first time. The financial problems persisted however and it was during one of the enforced periods of closure that a local tradesman, Alderman Samuel Wackrill formed the Leamington College Company and purchased the Binswood Avenue premises for £3,500 on the open market.
With the appointment in 1870 of Rev Joseph Wood, formerly of Cheltenham College, as headmaster, the school entered its most successful era. Sports grounds were purchased and large houses for boarding were acquired. A new chapel designed by John Cundall in 1876, a sanatorium and fives courts were added, along with a gymnasium designed by W Hawley Hall in 1891-2. Leamington College flourished under Dr Wood due, perhaps, in no small measure to his enthusiasm for corporal punishment. Wood left in 1890 to go on to Tunbridge School and subsequently to the Headship at Harrow.
Chapel at Binswood Hall when it was a Convent
By 1894 the property was mortgaged for £15,000 and the number of pupils had fallen to thirty-three. The school was resurrected as a Preparatory School under another Anglican cleric, Rev Arnold Edgehill but the writing was very much on the wall at Binswood Avenue and in July 1902 the shareholders put the property on the market.
On April 1st, 1903 a French religious order, the Society of the Sacred Heart, purchased the old college buildings for £10,000 for use as a training school for young ladies brought over from their convents in France. The nuns enlarged the premises and added a new wing at the north-west corner of the great hall. The Society occupied the site until the start of the Great War in 1914 when U-boat activity in the English Channel made the crossing from France too hazardous and the nuns rather reluctantly moved back to France leaving the property empty again.
The knock-on effects of the war were to have implications along much of the South coast of England when in 1917 many coastal resorts were subjected to enemy bombardment. It was felt necessary to move many establishments away from the coastal strip and so it happened that in September 1917 the masters and boys of Dover College arrived in Leamington and took over the College buildings which had lain empty for three years. Dover College’s tenure of the buildings lasted until 1919 when they were able to return to Dover. The premises were then again put up for sale.
In May 1920, Warwickshire County Council bought the vacant site for £37,000 to house Leamington College, the local grammar school, which until that time had been in part of buildings in Avenue Road now known as the Old Library. It became Leamington College for Boys in 1922. The Binswood Avenue buildings continued to be the physical and spiritual home for several generations of Leamington College boys. Major additions were made to the school with the building of a new science block and swimming pool and by the acquisition of adjoining properties. In its heyday, Leamington College had upwards of 650 pupils at any given time and a teaching staff of over 50. Over the years it turned out many young men bound for apprenticeships, managerial training and universities and who would later in life become pre-eminent in their chosen careers and whose accomplishments are recorded elsewhere. Perhaps one of the most distinguished was (Sir) Frank Whittle, father of the jet engine, who attended the school from 1918-1923.
Leamington College, drawing 1981, Michael Jeffs
The school continued to function under the headship of Fred Williamson and a long-serving staff until September 1979 when selective education in Leamington came to an end and the local grammar schools were swept away.
It became the sixth form college for North Leamington School and was known at that time as Binswood Hall and, less politely, by the pupils as “The Bin”. The buildings continued in use as a sixth form college until it moved to a new campus in Sandy Lane, Lillington and the old school was again boarded up.
There was a plan to convert the buildings to apartments in 2008 and this was subsequently approved and amended in 2012 and 2013. Binswood Hall was converted to a gated retirement complex, designed by a former pupil, at a reported cost of £20 million. The buildings, complete with facilities including a restaurant called Whittle’s which is open to the public, a gym and a swimming pool welcomed the first new occupants in 2014.
All the original Squirhill buildings have been sympathetically restored and the Tudor Gothic frontage has never looked better since the day in 1848 when Dr Jephson laid the foundation stone. The old boys of Leamington College are delighted that their alma mater has at long last a more assured future.
Michael Jeffs with invaluable help from Alan Griffin