Kingsbury High School

Kingsbury High School is a large two-site high school with academy status in Kingsbury, London, England. Kingsbury County Grammar School was established on 15 September 1925 as Kingsbury County School. Prior to the establishment of the school, the area had been served by a number of schools, which, in keeping with the future history of Kingsbury County School, had been subjected to the prevailing changes in population and politics of the area. Although there are reports of a school being kept in the area in c. 1530, by John Bishop the curate of Kingsbury, there is no more evidence until the nineteenth century of schooling in Kingsbury. Schooling is mentioned in 1819, and in 1822 a day school was opened. This school was situated near the junction of Kingsbury Road and Roe Green, which itself is looked at open by the current Kingsbury High School. This school was closed in 1876. Other schools existed in the area as well, with nearly all children in Kingsbury said to have attended one school or another in 1847. Kingsbury School Board was set up in 1875 following a damning report as to the cramped premises of the British School at the Hyde end of Kingsbury Road, itself an 1870 replacement of an infant's school that had been built in 1861 to the Congregational chapel in Edgware Road. Kingsbury Board School on Kingsbury Road, opened by the Kingsbury School Board in 1876, was to accommodate 130 pupils. In 1903 this became Kingsbury Council School. In 1922 this became the first senior mixed school in the area after its infants had been transferred to the new Kenton Lane Council School in 1922. This school operated as a junior school after 1928 until it was bombed in the Second World War. The establishment of Kingsbury County School When Kingsbury County School was opened in 1925, it was originally housed in a building which once belonged to the Aircraft Manufacturing Company, (or Airco as it was also known) on the Edgware Road opposite Colindale Avenue (now a Jewish school). The building had been adapted to take 380 pupils. The first headmaster was Mr Tracy, who had a staff of eight teachers, five full-time and three part-time. As the population of the surrounding area increased owing to the influx of workers to the aircraft industry, so did the roll of the school, and in 1929 a new school was built in Princes Avenue by John Laing and Co.