Excerpt from Blake of Oriel

The great red-brick building of the oppressively new Board School, which overshadowed the meaner erections around it like a veritable Upas-tree of knowledge, designed to swallow up all smaller attempts at scholastic institutions, loomed darkly against a calm October sky. Usually at this hour darkness and silence reigned throughout the deserted building, except when a belated "school-keeper" moved about the lower rooms with a pail and brush or prowled across the playground with an earnest desire of discovering some mischievous boy concealed in the darkest corner, for as yet, Continuation Schools were not, and even the Recreative Evening Society had not penetrated to this benighted neighbourhood. For it was far away in the wilds of North London that the Linden Street School was situated, and there is no place in London more neglected and less known to the charitable than North London. At least, that was the case in the days when the Linden Street School was new.

But on this evening of which we speak the school was lighted up almost from top to bottom, and a small crowd of children round the doors told its own tale.

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