Berkhamsted School

Tudor-founded boarding school on the High Street

Berkhamsted School was founded in 1541 under a charter from Edward VI's Court of Augmentations, on the site of an earlier school endowed by John Incent, Dean of St Paul's. The original red-brick schoolhouse, with its mullioned windows and Tudor chimneys, still stands at the High Street end of the site and is regarded as one of the best surviving examples of an Elizabethan grammar school building in England.

The school remains a co-educational boarding and day school; the surrounding playing fields, chapel, and red-brick boarding houses give the eastern end of the town a distinctly collegiate atmosphere. The grounds are private, but the front of the old schoolhouse and Dean Incent's nearby timber-framed house can be seen from the street.

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A story
The novelist Graham Greene was born here in 1904, in a house on the school grounds — his father, Charles Greene, became headmaster a few years later. Greene attended the school as a boarder, was bullied savagely, and twice ran away; the experience seeded a lifelong unease about authority and Englishness that runs through his novels.