Coal Hill School

Coal Hill School, later known as Coal Hill Academy, is a fictional school in the television series Doctor Who and Class. It is located on Coal Hill Road in the Shoreditch area of London.

The school appeared in the first episode of Doctor Who in 1963; "An Unearthly Child", and has had numerous appearances ever since.

The Coal Hill School is the setting of the first episode of Doctor Who, "An Unearthly Child", first broadcast in November 1963. In the episode, two teachers at the school, science teacher Ian Chesterton and history teacher Barbara Wright, discover that one of their students, Susan Foreman, is a time traveller who has been attending the school as her grandfather, the First Doctor (the central character of the series), makes repairs on their time machine, the TARDIS. The school was a constructed set shot inside Studio D at Lime Grove Studios.

Writer Kim Newman interprets Coal Hill School as a secondary modern school, which he notes is unusual for British children's television in the early 1960s; educational settings in children's television of the time were more commonly "fantasy fee-paying schools" like Billy Bunter's Greyfriars School. However, Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles interpret the lack of uniforms at Coal Hill as an indication that it is an early comprehensive school.

Newman stresses how important the grounded normality of the "unlovely" school was for Doctor Who's fantastic premise:

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