St Paul's School

St Paul’s School stands beside the Thames in Barnes, a quiet corner of south-west London. Founded in 1509 by John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, it occupies forty-three acres of playing fields, lawns and riverside trees. The school is a day school for boys aged thirteen to eighteen, with limited boarding. Since 1881 it has run its own preparatory school on the same site, now called St Paul’s Juniors. The grounds slope gently down to the river, where old boathouses and changing sheds line the bank. The school’s history is woven through English education. It was one of nine schools examined by the Clarendon Commission in the 1860s and argued successfully that it was a private foundation, so it escaped the Public Schools Act of 1868. In 2025 it topped The Sunday Times league table of British schools, having been ranked first among boys’ schools in 2023 and 2024. Its founder left no family; instead he endowed the school to teach good manners and literature. Erasmus wrote textbooks for the school, and it was the first English school to teach Greek. Visitors walk through iron gates into a quadrangle of red-brick buildings. The main block, designed by Alfred Waterhouse, rises in terracotta and stone above Hammersmith Road. Inside, oak panelling and tall windows frame classrooms and a library of leather-bound volumes. Beyond the buildings lie playing fields, cricket pitches and a boathouse where crews train on the Thames. The riverbank path offers long views across the water to Putney and the Surrey hills.