Parkstone Girls' Grammar School

Parkstone, Church House 1904
Enlarge photo |  More about this photo

This was the entrance to Parkstone Girls' Grammar school where I went from 1956, with Miss Allen as headmistress, until we moved to the present site in Sopers Lane in, I think, 1960 or 61, when these buildings were taken over by Ashley Cross Secondary School. The carved doors in the centre of the front were featured on the cover of the school magazine. Behind the little door to the right, which I don't remember being open, was a cloakroom, and the big window to the right of the main doors I think was the staff room. By the side of the wall in shadow on the left was an alleyway which I remember had the cookery room to its right.
The school was a maze of passageways and stairs. It also incorporated in its grounds two old houses, The Oaks, which mostly housed the fifth form, and The Lawns where the sixth form had their common room.
At the top of St Peter's Rd, behind the school, was Torvaine, another old house which we used for classrooms and where we had to walk as quickly as possible so as not to waste time between lessons. Opposite Torvaine in North Rd was our hockey pitch. (For tennis we went to the courts in Poole Park, or sometimes to the East Dorset Lawn Tennis Club. We went swimming in the old open-air pool at the back end of Poole Park, next to the railway line, and were regularly covered in smuts from passing steam trains!) There were also some 'temporary' buildings. One of these had two fourth form classrooms and another was the kitchen and dining room.
The school grounds, which sloped upwards gently from Commercial Rd at the front of the school to Church Rd at the back, were lovely, with lots of oak trees and with one particular area, which dipped down away from the top playground and which we called The Glade, providing a great place to sit during sunny lunchtimes.
The main hall, which had a gallery at the back where fifth formers sat during assemblies, was also used as the gym and seemed enormous to us when we first went to the school.

Looking back, it was the most inconvenient of buildings and must have been a nightmare for staff organising timetables and co-ordinating the movement of girls around the twisting stairs, corridors and 'covered ways'. But it had such character and brings back so many happy memories. Our brand new school in Sopers Lane was state of the art and especially exciting for us teenage girls as there were still some builders on site, much to the despair of our then headmistress, Miss McGuinness, but for all its sparkling glass, purpose built labs and art rooms, it never had the intimacy and homeliness of our old school at Ashley Cross.