Ysgol Gynradd Beaumaris was built in 1950-1 by N.Squire Johnson, County Architect. As a purpose-built modernist primary school it was large enough to accommodate 246 pupils with 7 classrooms and a day nursery. It has generous spatial planning with separate hall and dining room, representing best-practice for post-war primary education buildings. Its concrete walls are pebble-dashed and painted cream with large steel-framed casement windows and the concrete slab roofs have a very slight single pitch. A central two-storey brick tower houses the offices. The school is asymmetrically plannned with E-W classroom wings either side of an E-W linking corridor behind the entrance foyer, in order to provide well-lit classrooms on a sloping site. Each wing has a rear corridor to provide access to the rooms. Assembly hall, dining room and nursery are contained within a separate range on the NE side of the front. Its broad, low single storey design, with a backdrop of trees on the Baron Hill Estate, was designed to make a restrained impact on the landscape, at the same time offering spectacular views across the Menai Strait to the North Wales mountains.
The school is listed for its special architectural interest as an exceptional and well-preserved post-war school, designed in a spirit of post-war optimism to represent best practice in school architecture, and expressing the progressive approach to education in post-war Anglesey. In national terms the school demonstrates the importance of coherent planning and simple, strong detail in the formation of modernist architecture of the period.
The county primary school, upon opening, could accommodate 300 pupils and occupied an area of 5.9 acres with children‘s playing fields incorporated. Built at a cost of around £82,000, the school was the first in Anglesey to provide a nursery department for children under five years of age.
NJR 24/04/2009. Updated by M. Powel, RCAHMW. December 2023.
Sources: ’Beaumaris New School’, Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald, 7 September 1951, p.6; Cadw Listing Summary, no.87520
