Hammersmith College of Art and Building was founded in 1891 by Francis Hawke, initially with just a few evening classes to prepare students for science and art certificates. In 1904, the same year that it opened the Brixton School of Building in south London, the London County Council (LCC) took over Hammersmith College and built new premises for it in Lime Grove, Shepherds Bush. A trade school for girls was added in 1914. A further new building was opened in 1930.

From the outset the college had a tradition of training and education in art closely associated with the building professions and craft. This was largely due to William Richard Lethaby, architect and designer and first advisor to the LCC Technical Education Board, set up in 1892 to provide ‘facilities for practical and technical education in the poorer and manufacturing districts of London’.

Lethaby was a close friend of William Morris, Norman Shaw, Burne Jones, Walter Crane and Philip Webb and sat on the committee of Morris’s Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings. Central to his philosophy in education was the emphasis on the direct handling of tools in a workshop environment. Teaching should foster both a proper understanding of tools, materials and function and also the notion of art as service rather than as expression of genius. This accounts for the wonderful workshops at the Hammersmith College of Art and Building and the Brixton School of Building. Both institutions were championed by Lethaby.

In 1884 Lethaby had been instrumental in setting up the Art Workers Guild with four other young architects, all serving or ex-members of Norman Shaw’s staff who met informally to discuss problems of art and building. Lethaby believed that ‘any real Art-revival can only be on the lines of the unity of all the aesthetic arts’. The background to these ideas can be found in the teaching of Pugin, Ruskin and Morris. Although Lethaby encouraged handicrafts as a vital necessity within an industrial society, he did not reject mechanization. However, his proposals for machine production from first-rate models were not readily accepted by his contemporaries in Britain. Overseas, he had much more influence, particularly in Scandinavian and Germany. Between 1900 and 1914 Lethaby and his wife Edith made regular trips to Germany. His strong influence on Walter Gropius and the development of the Weimar Bauhaus is not generally appreciated in this country.

It is no coincidence that Arthur Korn, a former partner of the German architect Erich Mendelsohn, became one of the major influences in the re-emergence after the Second World War of the School of Architecture at the Hammersmith College of Art and Building in Lime Grove. It is a matter of great regret that this excellent school, which has had such an illustrious history in Hammersmith, has been allowed to migrate to the University of Greenwich on the other side of London.

Hans Haenlein, from the  Historic Buildings Group newsletter, Autumn 2006