Allhallows School
| Established | |
|---|---|
| Closed | 1998 |
| Type | Independent day and boarding school |
| Headmaster | Mr K. R. Moore |
| Location |
Rousdon Lyme Regis Devon DT7 3RA England Coordinates: 50°43′34″N 2°56′13″W / 50.726°N 2.937°W |
| Gender | Boys |
| Ages | 11–18 |
| Former pupils | Old Honitonians |
Allhallows College, previously known as Allhallows School, was an independent public school for boys in Devon, in the west of England. Predominantly a boarding school, but with some day boys, it was founded in Honiton about 1515, moved to a new home at Rousdon in the 1930s, and was closed in 1998, after a fall in the number of boys had led to a financial crisis.
Although Lyme Regis is in Dorset, the new school site was over the county boundary in Devon. However, the postal address was "Near Lyme Regis, Dorset", which has led to confusion.
The school was founded about 1515 in Honiton, probably as a chantry school where priests taught boys to read Latin so that they could sing in the choir. Later still it became a grammar school for the sons of the local gentry. Its origins in Honiton are the reason former pupils are still known as Old Honitonians, or OHs. The school was named after its neighbour All Hallows, a roadside chapel for travellers built sometime before 1327 and now the oldest existing secular building in Honiton.
By the 1930s there was an increase in traffic through Honiton, which lay on the main route to Cornwall, which became a serous hazard to the school, with premises on both sides of the main road. The headmaster of the day, George Shallow, found a new site in the shape of a large Victorian country house with over 350 acres of land on the coast at Rousdon, a few miles to the West of Lyme Regis. This stood on the cliffs of what was later called the Jurassic Coast, now a World Heritage Site. The house had been built in the 1870s for Sir Henry Peek, 1st Baronet, by the architect Sir Ernest George, who also built Southwark Bridge in London. (Among Sir Ernest's pupils was the even more famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens). In 1870 Sir Henry purchased the village of Rousdon, rebuilt the church and built the village school. He then commissioned Ernest George to design a mansion to take advantage of the superb position 152.4m/500 feet above the sea. Being a distance from the nearest town, the house had to be self-sufficient with laundry, coach houses, harness rooms, wine cellars, bowling alley, rifle range, china stores, bake houses, larders, museum, observatory, walled garden, tennis courts, farm buildings and numerous cottages to house the estate population, which at the end of the 19th Century extended to about 600.
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