St Marylebone CE Bridge School

Client Westminster City Council

Sector Schools and Colleges, SEND

Location Greater London

Value £10m

St Marylebone Church of England Bridge School is a co-educational Special Free School providing a high-quality education for statemented pupils aged 11-16, whose primary needs are related to their speech, language and communication.

The project has created a new main three-storey building to house up to 70 pupils, sharing the site of the Wilberforce Primary School in West Kilburn, London. The school has high aspirations for young people with special educational needs and places emphasis on a rich learning environment, a balanced curriculum and a personalised approach to learning.

The new Free School is a three-storey building to meet the brief and make the best use of a constrained site. The height of the new building responds to the local context, with London Stock brickwork and dentil detailing, green brick slips and bronzed cladding used to break up the elevations. The ground floor layout has been designed to enable the school to operate solely from the ground floor during breakfast club, breaks and after school club and also to allow for zoning for community use.

The first and second floors contain a mixture of general teaching and specialist spaces including science, food technology, music and drama, art and design technology with staff spaces distributed throughout. To make the most of the constrained inner city site the external spaces have been designed with a mixture of hard and soft landscaping to meet the different needs of each age group.