While I was queuing to vote the other day my eye fell on the private school across the road. It's a pretty standard bit of Victorian faux-Oxford, faux-baronial nonsense. The castellations tell you something about its relationship to the largely poor streets inhabited by kids who go to rather less aspirational schools elsewhere.
Something else struck me about it too.
Check out the clock, or rather the absence of one. Built in a period in which timekeeping was becoming more important, but reliable clocks and watches were expensive, lots of public and private institutions included clocks on their buildings - partly altruistically and partly as a means of controlling the kind of mass workforces that worked shifts. The clock clearly intended for this tower would primarily encourage discipline in its students, but could also have been a public gesture for those who could see through, but never cross, the railings that protect the young ladies and gentlemen from the less fortunate. Why was it never added? Was it thought to be the equivalent of virtue-signalling and ditched as the school became a proudly insular engine of class division. Why spend money on the oiks?
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