Mile Oak Approved School

Demolition in 1977

By Ray Hamblett/Bernard Langrish

The website Missing Ancestors.com  has a section on Industrial Schools  which shows that the original name for the school was Brighton Town and London County Council Industrial School for Boys. It then became the Portslade Industrial School. From 1933 it became the Mile Oak Junior Approved School for Boys.

The Home Guard used the square rooftop parapet of the main building for air-raid watch in WWII. The photographer of these pictures Bernard Langrish was among the guard before he was called up for full active service.

I was attending the Portslade Secondary School in the High Street in the early 1970s. As part of our P.E. curriculum, groups of us were given the chance to use the small swimming pool on the site to take lessons with our sports teacher Mr Parkin. Facilities were very basic in the unheated pool area. The adjoining communal changing room was just large enough for about twenty boys to to struggle into costumes while trying to maintain some sort of male dignity

The school site was cleared in 1977 and is now an area of modern housing.