Smart Street School

Next to Thomas Rush and Henry Tooley, William Smart is one of the best known merchants of early Tudor time Ipswich. He is better known for being the founder of the library in Ipswich. However, he has also made great contributions to the Tooley Almshouses by expanding the structure. So, there is also an inscpription dedicated to Smart with following text: “Let gentle Smart sleep on in pious trust - Behold his charity, respect his dust”. Smart Street also comemorates this powerful and charitable man.

Here's a corner of Ipswich, once a large school, then an Art School annexe of Suffolk College, later the scene of an exhibition as part of the 'Art Centre For Ipswich' campaign. Now the playground at the rear of the building has been redeveloped in a sympathetic style and the whole complex is residential. All the signs on this elevation are obliterated or covered with blue boards which once carried the Suffolk College lettering.

The location is quite historic, but the empty, concrete hulk of the former Gym & Trim business and its car park mark years of blight and neglect. Smart Street leads round to Shire Hall Yard, really a short street, which leads up behind the Tooley Almshouses end wall to Blackfriars Court. The Shire Hall, a large and nearly square brick building erected in 1699 by voluntary subscription, once stood on the G&T site. It acted as a courthouse with two distinct courtrooms and a room for the Grand Jury. Around the side of Smart Street School is Pleasant Row which originally may have been one of several narrow lanes running from the old town towards the Wet Dock. By the 19th century it was a narrow passage running from the Shire Hall Yard 'by a little gate at the south-east corner' to Star Lane (opened up in the 1980s and destroying many old lanes and buildings) where it is thought the old Drapers' Hall once stood.

The ironically named 'Pleasant Row' (below, see inset showing rusted modern steel street sign) runs down the side of the old school.  Since the building of the 'Eastern Gyratory' traffic system, a brick wall blocks the street with the once-familar dockside maltings (now demolished to make way for 21st century brutalist blocks) rising behind it.

Walking down Pleasant Row, we discover one architechtural piece of school lettering which has not been covered by a blue board: 'INFANTS' in terra cotta serif caps against a geometric design, with the school door intact below it. In the background is the sympathetic new residential development.
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Back in Smart Street, we find quite grand entrances once admitting the segregated boys and girls, away from the infants round the corner. Looking carefully, you can just make out the 'medieval'-style lettering as used on the Public Library entrance in Northgate Street, which has been in-filled with mortar: 'BOYS'. The inset shows it a little better. A fainter 'GIRLS' tablet is still present above the entrance in the 'square turret' feature further down Smart Street.


Compare with other schools' lettering:
Ragged Schools
More schools (Argyle Street, Clifford Road, Bramford Road, Ranelagh Road, Spring Road, Springfield Junior, Grey Coat Boys)
and Ipswich High School.
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©2004 Copyright throughout the Ipswich Historic Lettering site: Borin Van Loon
No reproduction of text or images without express written permission