Scotland Street School Museum
The Scotland Street School Museum is located in Glasgow and can be found on 225 Scotland Street in Kingston. Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed the school that now forms part of the Street School Museum. He built it between 1903 and 1906 incorporating beautiful stonework, striking lead glass towers with Scottish baronial style staircases and a stunning tiled entrance into the school. The school was closed in 1979 when the enrolment of students dropped to under one hundred students, which was tiny considering the original capacity of the school was for 1,250 students. Later the Street School museum was restored in 1990.
The Scotland Street museum gives visitors an idea of the history of education in Scotland through out the ages as well as the story about the actual Scotland Street Public School and the local area around it. The information is displayed through a variety of interactive displays, exhibitions, activity programmes and different audio-visual displays and photographs. The audio-visual displays allow you to listen to recollections of students who had formerly attended the school and shows you a video that gives you an introduction to the school. The various students from different decades tell you about classroom discipline, playground activities, school uniform and how some of them were evacuated during the Second World War.
A guide, who will give you additional information about the history of Scottish education, will also assist you and explain how education has changed through the years. You can also explore the actual classrooms that were used and have been reconstructed showing you the conditions that the students and teachers had to deal with and the facilities that were available at that time. There is also a room known as the Mackintosh room, which has a touch-screen computer giving you an opportunity to try design and also informs you of the troubles that he had in keeping with his designs for the building.
The Scotland Street School Museum has three classrooms for you to inspect each showing you different reconstructions of the schoolroom. The first classroom is from the Victoria era, the next is from the time period of the Second World War with the last one showing you a classroom from the 1950’s and 60’s. Mackintosh incorporated in his designs for a barrel vaulted cookery room, a ceramic-tiled drill hall and cloakrooms. Opening hours are from 11:00 hours to 17:00 hours on a Sunday but 10:00 hours to 17:00 hours during rest of the week.
