Originally designed by British architect Gerald Horsley between 1903 and 1911, St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, west London, has delivered over a century of educational excellence, nurturing generations of female leaders. Our masterplan emerged from extensive stakeholder consultation, ensuring that we were honouring the school’s history while meeting its future ambitions.

Our Centre for Design & Innovation, housed in a new two-storey building, is a cross-curricula, multi-faceted space that incorporates technology, design, and maker labs conceived around collaborative working and shared educational experience. This project-based learning space, a new format for the school, will bring STEM subjects and the arts together, allowing creative thinking to flourish and setting the next generation of engineers, inventors and entrepreneurs on a path to success.

Across the campus, a new three-storey staff hub is designed to consolidate formerly disparate staff accommodation into a new collegiate and agile working environment. Unusually for a staff facility, its design is student-centred, improving communication, pastoral care and wellbeing. The designs of both new buildings respond sensitively to the existing Edwardian site, with contemporary gable forms, chimneys and red brick and stone detailing allowing them to sympathetically integrate into the school campus.

The scheme also involves the remodelling and refurbishment of the school’s main building to provide improved pastoral facilities for students, including a wellbeing suite, and upgraded teaching and administrative spaces. Glazed links are designed to join both the Centre for Design & Innovation and staff hub to the main building, creating a continuous concourse. These link spaces transform the flow of pupils around the school, improving accessibility across the site.

Sustainability has informed our design thinking from the outset. The chimneys, a modern interpretation of Horsley’s originals, are part of a ventilation strategy that maximises natural ventilation, and includes a thermal mass labyrinth for temperature stability. Glulam and cross-laminated timber form the majority of the superstructures, which significantly reduces the embodied carbon of the scheme, as does the reuse of existing masonry. The introduction of a site-wide ambient heating and cooling loop linked to heat pumps will substantially reduce operational carbon. As a whole, the masterplan is a statement of intent on the future of sustainable architecture that points to where education is going.