Education and inspiration

Haileybury, Hertfordshire -In 1862, the empty buildings of an Imperial training college were occupied by one of a new generation of public schools. John Goodall looks at the story and development of the site

- John Goodall

IN October 1805, the East India Company bought a small estate outside Hertford, once owned by a surgeon, William Walker, who had worked in its service. The intention was that Hailey Bury, as it was then, would be the site of a college for young men destined to serve in the administration of the Company’s territories. Established in 1600 as a trading monopoly, ‘John Company’, as it was popularly known, had laid the foundation for 18th-century British Imperial expansion in India and then into China. Managed from London, it maintained all the trappings of a sovereign power, even a standing army.

The quality of recruits to the Company’s service was not high and the issue of training them had been of concern for some time. In 1787, the writer of one report acoustically observed that he ‘did not think Britain could have furnished such a set of wretched objects’. East India College was established in 1805 and, for the first years of its existence, occupied temporary premises in Hertford Castle, close to its intended future home. The Company turned to its surveyor, Henry Holland, to repair the castle and plan the new college.

To Holland’s considerable annoyance, his plans for the new institution were almost immediately set aside in favour of those devised by the 27-year-old William Wilkins of Cambridge, the son of a builder and university educated. As a young man, his interest in architecture had been expressed in accomplished drawings and surveys of medieval buildings. One thread of his subsequent career—as a domestic architect—drew on this knowledge of Gothic, but it was not the style of his public buildings.