THE MOVING STORY OF ST MARTINS SCHOOL OF ART

MY INTEREST IN the St Martins School of Art derives from the fact that my mother made sculpture there during most of the 1950s and in the first half of the 1960s.

St Martins was founded in 1854 by the Vicar of St Martins in the Fields, Henry Mackenzie. It was first housed in Shelton Street (formerly, ‘Castle Street’), near to the Seven Dials and Covent Garden. In 1859, it became independent of the Church. By the 1930s, the school had moved into a Modernist building designed for the London County Council by E. P. Wheeler and H. F. T. Cooper, about whom very little is known. It was in this building, now occupied by Foyles bookshop, that my mother worked as a sculptor.

In 1989, St Martins merged with the Central School of Art and Design. The new entity is called Central St Martins. Since 2011, it has been housed in a converted warehouse complex on Granary Square at King’s Cross. Today, the 17th of September 2024, I visited its splendid, spacious premises, which combine well-preserved elements of its industrial precursor with excellent 21st century architectural features. I was there to look at material in the archives, which proved most interesting, and about which I will write in the future.

Whenever I think of St Martins, I am moved, not because it has shifted several times, because I am moved remembering my mother’s association with it.