Sea Mills Infant School remembered

At the old Infants School on Hallen Drive in Sea Mills, nature has taken over. In the grounds that once reverberated to the sound of children’s voices, only birdsong can be heard. Weeds run riot across the playground and over-ripe apples drop from the trees.

The site is overgrown after being closed for eight years – photo Mary Milton

The school has been closed for eight years and this little bit of Sea Mills history will shortly disappear with the demolition of the old school buildings.

The school opened to accommodate Infants classes in 1951, when the combined Infants and Junior School in Riverleaze became too small. The site at Hallen Drive was attended and remembered fondly by multiple generations of Sea Mills children before closing in 2012. Things have come full circle, and all the local primary-age children again attend school at the Riverleaze site.

Marilyn Hartley (second left) and Susan Jenkins (third left) in the class of 1951. Photograph from the collection of Sue Alford

Marlilyn Hartley and Sue Jenkins were amongst the first pupils in the brand new school in 1951. Now in their 70s they remain good friends. The school holds many happy memories for them – of playing hopscotch and skipping in the playground.

The classrooms have been abandoned since 2012, work still on the walls. Photo by Mary Milton

In the abandoned buildings, some of the last displays of children’s work still remain. Garish colours shout from the walls and the checked tiles look like they are straight out of a 1950’s American diner. The building’s unusual curved roof must have been state-of-the-art at the time.

Celebrating the London Olympics is appropriate for a school where Robin Cousins was a pupil. Photo by Mary Milton

It seems fitting that the most intact remaining display marks the London 2012 Summer Olympics. Olympic figure skater Robin Cousins, who made his Olympic debut in 1976, is a former pupil. The school and headteacher, Miss Nash, featured with him on This is Your Life in 1980. Cousins had returned victorious to Bristol, taking an open-top bus tour around the city – including his childhood area of Sea Mills – before being surprised by Eamon Andrews with the red book on College Green.

Robin Cousins isn’t the only famous former pupil: wildlife presenter Simon King also lived locally as a child and attended school here. No doubt some of his early wildlife encounters happened in the woods and parkland around the suburb.

The school in the 1960s with its unusual curved roof. Photo by Debra Britton

Debra Britton also attended the school in the 1960s when Miss Nash was headteacher. The school seemed very modern then, she recalls: “I joined the school after moving to Bristol and had already been at school for a while. My previous school was an old Victorian building, so having windows I could see out of was great.” Continuing the family tradition, her own daughter attended the school in the 1980s.

The exterior of the school hall is overgrown, eight years after the last pupil left. Photo Mary Milton

The metal school hall doors with their peeling paint are now shut and locked. Asbestos was a common building material in 1950s schools and now the inside is firmly out of bounds. The hall stands sad and empty, school assemblies just a memory.

A school Nativity play in the 1970s. Photo by MS Gillett, supplied by Steph Gillett

Steph Gillett’s father took the picture above, showing the hall buzzing with activity during a Nativity play in the 1970s. The children will be in their 50s now – perhaps having also seen their own children’s plays in this same hall. Steph himself remembers singing Blow the Wind Southerly and My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean in that hall in around 1957.

Though, not all his memories of his school days are so positive: “My most vivid memory is of getting the end of a skipping rope across my eye in a PE class, supposedly an accident on part of the other pupil but I was never convinced.

“Following a visit to the eye hospital I spent some time with an eye patch looking like Long John Silver. It made doing simple tasks very difficult, and I still, apparently, have a slight scratch on the eye lens.”

For some this was their first classroom. Photo by Mary Milton

Jason Budd remembers this room being his first classroom, but like Steph Gillett it’s PE that sticks in his mind. “My main memory of the playground is having to do PE in my pants and vest because I forgot my exercise kit,” he says.

The striped planter was made at least a decade ago at the school gardening club. Photo by Mary Milton

Still in position at the front of the school is the striped planter Jane Wilshire remembers helping children to paint when she ran a gardening club in around 2007. The school grounds allowed for the children to have their own garden. “The children planted herbs and raspberries,” Jane recalls. “Some of them had never tasted raspberries before.”

School friends Jackie White and Keren Berg re-visited their old school in 2019. Photos by Keren Berg and Jackie White

Like many, lifelong friends, Jackie White and Keren Berg remember their little local school with affection. Keren told the Sea Mills Heritage Project in 2019: “We were really cushioned. Sea Mills was a lovely place to live in the 1970s. The schools were lovely.”

Jackie agrees: “We were in a bubble … when we went to Portway (Secondary) School all the other kids were streetwise, and we weren’t!”

The school has been occupied since it closed, through a property guardianship scheme. Photo by Mary Milton

Since being closed, the school has had a second, temporary life, as low-price accommodation for property guardians, who have been enjoying the grounds and keeping the building safe. The site was originally earmarked for housing but now is going to be a school again. The existing buildings will be demolished and there is now planning permission for North Star Academy to be built: a school for pupils aged between seven and 16 with behavioural difficulties, including social, emotional and mental health needs.

Although the new building will be a mix of one and two storeys, it will be built roughly within the footprint of the existing building and much of the green space will be preserved. It is hoped that some of the school’s facilities will be available to the wider community, which currently lacks large secular meeting spaces and sports facilities – particularly since the closure of Sea Mills Community Centre almost a year ago.

Class of 1958 outside the hall. Photo from the collection of Philip Peacock

Many are sad to lose this time capsule of a building, so fondly remembered in the area: a place where young lives were moulded and life-long friendships formed. There’s relief though, too, that the site will still be used as a school, and that children who might otherwise struggle in mainstream schools will benefit.

Mary Milton is reporting on Sea Mills as part of Bristol24/7’s community reporter scheme, a pilot project which aims to tell stories from areas of Bristol traditionally under-served by the mainstream media

Main photo by Mary Milton

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