Villiers High School science block - a visit to my old school after 40 years!

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Villiers High School science block - a visit to my old school after 40 years!
Villiers High School science block - a visit to my old school after 40 years!

Back to school - after 40 years :)
So I was on a rare visit back to my home city of London and, more specifically, my birth town of Southall, Middlesex.

I was lucky to have lived my young life between Southall and Greenford, in west London, right under the flight path of the London Heathrow cross-wind runway 23. Whenever we had a nice stormy south-westerly wind, you would start to hear the familiar sound of approaching aircraft. As we were around 4 miles out, aircraft would call out over the outer-marker just as they flew over the house.

When they weren't using runway 23, but the main westerly runways 28L and 28R, I still had a reasonably good vantage point out of the back bedroom window of my house - binoculars or even telescope in hand! However, even at school, I was able to use my location to my advantage for plane spotting purposes :) My school was actually a mile closer to Heathrow approach, and I spent many a lunch hour ensconced on the top floor of the 1960s built science block, seen here in this video.

So, revisiting some 40 years later, I was quite astonished to find the building exactly as I remember it, perhaps just repainted a few times. Here is the view taken from the adjoining Southall Park, on a blustery September's day.

Villiers High School The school first opened as Southall County School with 54 pupils on Sep 14, 1907. It was one of the first new county secondary schools to be built in Britain serving the relatively new suburb of Southall. It changed its name to Southall Grammar in 1945. In 1963 the school merged with Southall College of Technology (a boys' technical school, which had been located in Beaconsfield Road) and was renamed Southall Grammar Technical School. The name was changed to Villiers High School in 1974. More info here: www.villiers.ealing.sch.uk/our-school/history-of-villiers

You can see a random selection of my aviation photos here: flickriver.com/photos/heathrowjunkie/random/

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Taken on: September 25, 2020
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