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Some Homecoming! (1944)

With the war coming to an end, it was time to return to London. But it was clear that the Polytechnic building at 309 Regent Street was no longer suitable for housing a school with increasingly noisy traffic, an overcrowded site (the adult Institute continued to expand) and no playground. In the closing months of the war, a plan emerged to acquire premises near Regents Park. Architects plans were drafted and the costs of alterations agreed. But a V2 flying bomb fell on Holford House, the proposed site. Neither money, nor workers, nor materials were available to re-build it. This was just one of several proposed solutions which came to naught. Meanwhile...

Some boys had returned to London well before the rest of the school. They were being taught in St Katherine's House in Albany Street, a grand three-storied building with Adam ceilings. At the end of its long garden, debris from the Blitz filled a branch of the Grand Union Canal providing an unusual play area for the boys. But there were more classes than teachers (many were still in Minehead) and masters struggled to teach outside their specialisms. Additional space was found in the L.C.C. Institute for Distributive Trades building in Charing Cross Road as the Polytechnic Institute needed the classrooms in Regent Street. However, several science forms remained at the Poly and used the laboratories in its Great Portland Street Annex in Little Titchfield Street.

A school already spread over four sites was bad enough. But somewhere had to be found for the bulk of the pupils, soon to return from Minehead. So yet another site was brought into use. Pulteney Schools, at the southern end of Berwick Street in the heart of Soho, had been a Victorian Elementary School but closed in 1937. The derelict site had been used by the Auxiliary Fire Service during the war. But nothing else was available in war-torn London.

Now spread over five sites, the only place where the whole school could assemble was the public cinema in the Polytechnic building and this they did on Monday mornings. The school also had the use of the swimming pool in Regent Street and the Polytechnic sports ground at Chiswick. But they managed somehow for over a decade in their temporary accommodation with much to-ing and fro-ing between Oxford Circus and Soho. Not everyone went the shortest way. An illicit route via Hamley's toy shop in Regent Street was not unknown.

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