Howells School Denbigh and its sister establishment, Howells School Llandaff, led the way in secondary education for girls in Wales. Provision for these schools was provided by the will of sixteenth century Denbigh Merchant Draper, Thomas Howell, which included a trust to provide dowries for orphan girls of his own lineage. Due to a lack of successful applicants, an investment fund rapidly accumulated under the management of the Company of Drapers, and with a substantial fund and no apparent heirs, an Act of Parliament in 1853 gave power to the Trust to instead establish schools for girls in Wales. A scheme was drawn up to provide two schools intended for those who had lost one or both parents, one at Denbigh and the other at Llandaff. The schools were designed by Herbert Williams, London architect, and built between 1858 and 1859 costing £20,000 each. Initially the 55 attendees included the daughters of small farmers and labourers. However, the governors soon decided that the schools should be only for `gentlewomen?, the Llandaff headmistress considering that it was unfair to admit children of the lower classes who, after experiencing the luxuries that the schools could offer would then have to return home to a simple labourer's cottage and life.

The initial building was a long range, constructed in the `free Elizabethan? with a distinctive asymmetrical entrance to the centre, including a Tudor arch doorway with coat of arms, inscription and oriel window above and an off-set bell-cote. From the plan of Llandaff, identical but slightly larger, it can be seen that a relatively small proportion of the ground floor was given over to educational needs, the majority utilised to serve the needs of the boarders and live-in staff. Two large day rooms were provided for the girls when not at lessons, in addition to the dining room, convalescent and matron rooms, cloakrooms and an entire suite of rooms for the storage and preparation of food and other household processes. In comparison the one schoolroom and two small classrooms seem minimal when looked at in the context of the curriculum which consisted of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, English grammar, geography, music, drawing, French, Christian religion, needlework and cooking. On the first floor were two dormitories sleeping 25 each to the front, and a third smaller room to the rear sleeping ten.

As the school increased in size and more specialist teaching facilities were required, a number of additions and further buildings were constructed. In 1914 a north-west wing designed by Heaton Commyn and Lesley Moore accommodated a science block with laboratories, shortly followed by the south-east wing, while in 1929-30 an interest free loan from the Drapers Company funded construction of a great hall and dining hall in two cross-wings added to the main facade, a new wing, sanatorium and three dormitory blocks. All were designed by Maurice Webb, but with substantially different handling of styles reflecting a careful acceptance of the concordance needed between the old and new.

The new wings, all attached to the existing ranges were of a Tudor Gothic sympathetic to, and perpetuating, the collegiate feel of the school. A school brochure, dated 1938, is at pains to describe the depth of planning and thought which has been put into the new facilities to maximise `beauty with efficiency?. Emphasis was placed on the modern concepts of what was required from school accommodation, the rooms and corridors `spacious and airy?, the furniture of `simple and pleasing design?, the lighting `particularly harmonious and well placed? and the lavatory block `modern and hygienic?. The provision of individually designed rooms for modern languages, art, history and geography with storage, model and picture display `facilitated by cork covering of the walls, and by a surrounding rack at eye level? are accompanied by the laboratories (separately equipped for general science, physics and biology) and tiered lecture theatre are joined by a sixth room study centre, with individual studies which even came complete with an attached small kitchen. This accommodation is an exemplar of how far design had travelled from a practical view, but also its influence in bringing `such comfort, beauty and efficiency ?that they must evolve, in all those who have the privilege of using them, a determination to develop those qualities of leadership and intellectual integrity which alone can repay the architect and the care of the governing body?.

The physical separation of the St George, St Andrew and St Patrick residences (allowing the school to accommodate nearly 400 boarders), and the sanatorium gave Webb a freedom to design with a much cleaner, modernist hand, the concrete balconies, large semi-circular windows and stepped facades imposing an Art Deco feel so `satisfying in its simplicity and perfect of proportion, that no discordant note is struck?. The sanatorium encompassed the latest ideas in `architecture for health? of the 1930's when open-air and sunlight treatments were almost universally adopted, combining open, south facing balconies and a carefully considered scheme of decoration with a range of wards for varying degrees of medical emergencies. These ranged from isolation rooms for infectious diseases, general wards, and convalescent day rooms to a room equipped for the provision of artificial sunlight treatment when the weather made the flat topped roof and balconies redundant.

S Fielding RCAHMW October 2018

Malcolm Seaborne, 1992, `Schools in Wales 1500 ? 1900: A Social & Architectural History
Schools Inquiry Commission, XX, 152, gives the costs as £24,000 (Llandaff) & £20,000 (Denbigh). The contract prices of the main buildings were £17,764 for Llandaff & £15,310 for the slightly smaller building at Denbigh (The Builder, 1858, 252)
Schools Inquiry Commission, 1868
Howells School Denbigh, Prospectus 5th November 1938
Denbighshire Historical Transactions, Vol.8 (1959),Howell's School Denbigh