High Street, Langton Matravers #3

...another beautiful day and, probably, the hardest frost of the season in Purbeck. Most of today was spent on a mixture of supermarket and Christmas shopping so, with limited free time, it was a good opportunity for the next in my One Street series.

The Old Malthouse was once, unsurprisingly, a brewery. In 1906, it was purchased by the ex-England football player, Rex Corbett and founded as a school with an opening count of ten pupils. Rex's brother-in-law, Tom Pellatt was already running the Durnford School further down the road, which, as I mentioned in a former blip, was the prep school that Ian Fleming attended. Incidentally, the stone wall on the left in my link above, is the original wall to the gates of Durnford.

In 1939, the school was sold to Victor Haggard and Evan Hope-Gill, at which time it had 37 boys. When Durnford was requisitioned for the army later that year, the boys attending Durnford were transferred to the Old Malthouse. The army finally moved out in 1948 and Durnford was acquired by the owners of the Old Malthouse, who demolished the main buildings to allow the land to be converted into playing fields.

By 1974, the school had 80 boys and was sold to a trust. It became co-educational during the 1990s but the number of pupils continued to decline after having reached a peak of about 100 in the early 1980s. It finally closed in 2007.

In 2008, the property became part of the Cothill Educational Trust's portfolio, and offered week-long science-based courses run in collaboration with the Natural History Museum, through the Tree School Project.

Today, I was very surprised to see that "For Sale" signs have gone up and the classrooms and offices appear to have been emptied. I could't find anything on their website about closing and there hasn't been anything in the local press. I may know more when I write up a future post in this series...