Description: Heanor Technical School looking north-east from Mundy Street. The building seen here was then newly completed, having been erected in 1912 at a cost of £15,000 as a replacement for Heanor Hall. The latter had been built about 1690 for the Roper family and had been adapted to form the Technical School by 1900.
The rebuilt and enlarged School was designed by George H Widdows (1871-1946) who had been appointed architect to Derbyshire County Council's Education Committee in 1904 and then the Council's Chief Architect six years later. By the time he retired in 1936 he had been responsible for the design of 60 elementary schools and 17 secondary schools across Derbyshire. Widdows became nationally acknowledged as an exponent of advanced ideas on school planning and hygiene and as early as 1913 The Builder declared that his work 'constitutes a revolution in the planning and arrangement of school buildings ... a real advance which places English school architecture without a rival in any European country or the United States.'
The School later became Heanor Grammar School and from 1976 formed part of South East Derbyshire College, which itself merged with Derby College in 2010. The Mundy Street campus was listed Grade II in 1988.
Derby-based postcard publisher F W Scarratt took this photo and allocated it the number 726 in his series. The figures posing for the camera are his wife Polly and son Alec. See DCHQ501115 and DCHQ501799 for the published version of this image.