THE north end of Darlington is peculiarly scrunched up, with hulking late Victorian church buildings looming up over the terraces of workers' houses so tightly packed it is a major surprise that there is not a wing mirror replacement shop on every corner.

Harrowgate Hill Infant School is like that, too, squeezed into a space between North Road and Bowman Street, where there is hardly room to breathe.

That is due to change in September 2005, when a new infant school opens a couple of hundred yards down Thompson Street West on the junior school site.

It will be a welcome move that has been clogging the pipeline for at least 25 years - but it will leave the hulking Edwardian schoolrooms with their polished pitch pine floors facing an uncertain future. And it will be the end of the site's 130 years of educational use.

A schoolroom was opened there in 1873 by William Askwith and Edward Robinson, who were missionaries sent into the new terraces by St Paul's Church.

St Paul's, which was near Morrison's supermarket in North Road, was built in 1872. Regular readers will know all about its famous priest, who married Edward and Mrs Simpson in 1937, and about its destruction by fire in 1973.

St Paul's was built to cater for the burgeoning population of the north end of Darlington. By 1889, the church found that its two schools - there was another one at the Rise Carr end of Westmoreland Street - had 1,000 pupils.

Educating so many was a drain on church resources, especially as both schools needed rebuilding.

In 1891, the church off-loaded its schools to the Darlington School Board. In fact, the board paid the church £700 for the school in Bowman Street - half the cost - with another £285 to follow when St Paul's stopped using the premises as a Sunday school.

Almost immediately, the board advertised for a contractor to build a new infants' school in Harrowgate Hill.

It appears to have taken ten years for the school to be built in Lowson Street. It opened on February 3, 1902. Miss Mary Watson was headteacher, and she had two assistants: Miss EA Nicholls and Miss E Allison. Together they taught 97 infants.

The new school allowed the juniors a little breathing space in Bowman Street - but not for long. As the north end population continued to expand, they were soon overflowing, and in April 1909 a £4,600 "handsome and commodious" boys' school was built to the design of borough engineer George Winter (who also laid out North Lodge Park).

The school had seven classrooms 24ft 6in square, which could hold 420 boys (60 to a class). Its centrepiece was a hall 75ft by 25ft in which it was expected that the boys would do a daily military drill.

It was said that the children of Harrowgate Hill were of poor physique and fitness and the military drill would build them up - perhaps it was coincidence when, five years later, the First World War broke out.

In peacetime, the schools continued to grow so that in 1930 another junior school was built on the Bowman Street site. The boys joined the girls in this new school, and the infants moved out of Lowson Street and into the boys' "handsome and commodious" building.

For 50 years there was stability in Harrowgate Hill - although there still was not much room to breathe.

In 1981 the new junior school was built in Thompson Street West; the 1902 Lowson Street building was demolished and the 1930 junior school was sold.

This just left the "handsome and commodious" building on the Bowman Street site occupied by the infants.

It is true to say that this period piece of a schoolroom is still "handsome and commodious" - it is even more handsome now that the outside lavatories have gone, but not quite so commodious, because modern class sizes mean it can only accommodate 210, half of 1909's 420 pupils.

It is also true that with its lofty drill hall, it is rather outdated.

After September 2005, it will be interesting to see how many new homes they try to squeeze on to its site.

Published: 16/07/2003

Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505062.