Henry Morris and the First Village Colleges

In 1924, Henry Morris, Chief Education Officer for Cambridgeshire, outlined his vision for the village college, a new institution that was to merge the educational and ordinary life of the countryside. Planned as a senior school, adult education and community centre, the institution was also to play a significant role in rural reconstruction. Completed in 1939, Impington was the fourth village college to be opened in Cambridgeshire, and the most famous, designed by Walter Gropius. But that college was only one part of the story and this chapter contends that Gropius’s project was the culmination of a much longer trajectory of Morris’s ideas about community education and architecture, forged through his life and work. In arguing this position, I highlight how spatial arrangements in the architecture of progressive education were formed, represented and constituted through Morris’s own educational experience and philosophy, the documents he wrote and the materiality and images of the buildings themselves.