Our town through time: a brief history of Chesterfield Girls' High School

A heritage guide to Chesterfield with historian Philip Riden

Transcript

00:00Hello, I'm Philip Ryden. I'm a retired member of the staff of the History Department of Nottingham University.

00:06I have a long-standing interest in the history of Chesterfield, my hometown.

00:10We're going to have a look at some of the more interesting buildings in the town centre this morning

00:15and I'll say something about the history of each of them.

00:18The girls' high school stood next door to the boys' grammar school, but the proximity was quite coincidental.

00:25The history of girls' secondary education begins much later than that of boys.

00:30It begins with a privately established girls' school in a house called East Bank on the opposite side of Sheffield Road,

00:37which the County Council acquired as a makeshift temporary girls' secondary school.

00:42This was agreed to by the Board of Education on condition that, as soon as possible,

00:47the county built a new girls' high school building in Chesterfield.

00:51The site was given by George Albert Eastwood, again one of Chesterfield's leading businessmen of the period,

01:00and the design was by George Henry Widows, the County Council's first school's architect

01:05and one of the outstanding figures in the early 20th century history of school architecture nationally.

01:11This was probably the most prestigious project the County Council had at that date undertaken,

01:16and it would be fair to say that no expense was spared to produce not only a quite outstanding design,

01:22but a beautifully finished building.

01:24It was vastly superior to the boys' school buildings of around the same date,

01:28built at a time when the boys' school was still independent.

01:31The school was renamed St. Helena after Second World War,

01:37when Chesterfield Education Committee were anxious to avoid using names like High School and Grammar School,

01:43at the same date that the boys' school ceases to be Chesterfield Grammar School

01:47and becomes Chesterfield High School.

01:49The name St. Helena was an adaptation of the name of St. Helen's Chapel,

01:54the disused chapel which the boys' school took over in 1598 as its first home.

02:00The chapel itself stood just inside the plot occupied by the boys' school,

02:05and so the name was feminised to become St. Helena's School,

02:10although it was still colloquially often called the High School.

02:13The school shut during the reign of terror of 1991,

02:17when all the existing secondary schools in Chesterfield were closed, good and bad,

02:21and the school was used for some years by the County Council for miscellaneous officers.

02:27It fell into a poor state, was rescued from that by the University of Derby,

02:32which acquired it, refurbished it to a very high standard,

02:35and now use it as a satellite campus in Chesterfield.

02:39It remains an imposing monument,

02:41both for the cause of women's secondary education in the early 20th century

02:45and the work of G.H Widows,

02:47one of the outstanding architects of school buildings of his generation.

02:51of his generation.