The school,which was built in 1861, was destroyed by fire in 1951. But a lasting photographic record of some of the youngsters, and teachers, who passed through its doors over a 90 year period can be seen in these images from the archives of Aireborough Historical Society. The AHS website says: “Thomas Layton had St Peter’s Church School built in 1710, as a school for boys at the junction of Layton Avenue and Town Street. “A church school for girls and infants was built on the present site on Town Street in 1861 and extended in 1876 with two classrooms for boys, together with a master’s house.
For decades now, the diminutive but delightful Shire classics have been the niche collector’s best friend. These little books, whose subjects have included clay pipes, pewter, samplers, historic ships, ceramics and even the Victorian domestic servant, for me evoke pleasurable hours browsing in village bookshops. So it is with great affection that I picked up their latest publication, Jason Sandy and Nick Stevens’s
Thames Mudlarking: Searching for London’s Lost Treasures – which was even more appealing because I myself am a keen Thames mudlarker (some of the beads I have found are illustrated in the book). The book conveys its potted history of London via a range of artefacts recovered in the river by mudlarks – amateur archaeologists intent on locating fragments of the past. The variety of these artefacts is such that this is the first Shire book to bring together so many different areas of collectable interest in one place. It romps through the centuries with gusto, and