St Paul’s School chose Patel Taylor through an invited competition to masterplan its Thames-side campus in Barnes. It has had an outstanding academic record throughout its long history, even though its character changed with the move to this site from the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Patel Taylor set out to define the school’s identity around its campus. This involves reorganising the public realm with a clear network of pedestrian routes to connect the school to the river, and to develop that network with a series of new public spaces that logically define sites for new buildings. The order of development is flexible to give the school options and to cause minimum disruption to its operations. Outline planning consent, granted in 2008, allowed a 40 per cent uplift in floorspace even though much of the campus is on Metropolitan Open Land.
