I love these old schools with their statues of children dressed in blue that are scattered around London and beyond. Blue is always the colour for the clothes that these little ones wear because, back in the eighteenth century, blue was the cheapest dye. These were charity schools and the children who attended them came from the poorer neighbourhoods. So blue it was for their uniforms.
This building at 43 Hatton Garden was originally a church. It was put up after the Great Fire in around 1670 but later converted into a charity school at the end of the seventeenth century. A school it remained for over two hundred years until a visit from the Luftwaffe. Hit by an incendiary bomb on the night of February 20th, 1944, St Andrew Parochial School, as it was then known, was devastated and would never reopen. As with many building of its era, it came into being as a consequence of one fire in 1666 only to be brought to its knees by the devastation of another in the second world war. The building was restored after the war as offices and re-named Wren House, after Christopher Wren who may or may not have had a hand in the original design of the Church. It is now Grade II listed.
The two children in blue, who were added to the school in the eighteenth century, survived the fire because they were taken down at the start of the war and, like many real London children, evacuated to the country, in their case, they were sent to Bradfield College for safe-keeping.
The interior of the building has none of the original features and you can see that the top level of the building with the triangular frontpiece is largely reconstructed. The main frame of the building remains in surprisngly good nick.
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