The School Layout

There is a time in your life when you really wish you had done something when you had the chance. This is one of those times and it is the fact that I never took any pictures of the buildings that formed Lewis School Pengam. Sadly, they have been demolished to make way for more modern buildings, but they can never replace the originals. 

Above is the only the picture that I could find on the web from a collection of a former pupil, Mr. Alan Davies. 

The Main Building - Upper School

Let me start as if it was a typical day at school. The bus would arrive at the Pengam bustop, opposite the small bunch of shops. We would walk down the slight incline, then up the lane that ran alongside the school that lay on the righthand side.

There was time when there was only one entrance into the school from this lane, but with the construction of a new block of classrooms, two entrances became available. The first entrance took you into the new two-storey complex which housed basic classrooms on the ground floor plus the new Headmasters office. The then Headmaster, Mr. Glyn Rees, used to park his car in front of this building. It's top floor included separate common rooms for the teachers and sixth formers. 

Probably due to the location of the Headmasters office, most pupils walked further up the lane and entered into the school through the original entrance. Directly in front of this lay the main school building, the hub of the Lewis School Pengam. 

There was a small roundabout structure just inside main gate and a small monument with a circular flower bed around it, provided a turning area for vehicles. To each side of the main building there were tow paths. The left path was wide enough for vehicular access, in partucular the teachers cars. The right hand path was mainly used for pedestrian access and was bordered with a few trees. It overlooked the tennis courts and grounds below. Opposite the monument was situated the first doorway into the main school building. It was the annex to the chapel that lay inside the main building. Every day started with a morning service here for the whole school.

The left hand lane passed the outer walls of classrooms three and four, then the outside toliets, the physics room eight and finally to the central forecourt, used as a carpark by the teachers. To the left of this lane and above, lay the old school house and the long redbrick building of the school canteen.

The right hand lane was a bit more picturesque. It passed the outer walls of classrooms three and four, the Headmasters Office and the other physics room six, down a slight incline past the old woodwork room. At the bottom of this lane, on it's left lay the new complex which housed the chemistry and geography class rooms and on it's right, the old biology lab. The left hand side of this lane had quite a pleasant view of a sloping grassland area and two tennis courts.. Above the tennis courts there were some wooden spectator benches, always in a pretty poor state. The lane itself was lined with various trees and was always kept in good condition.

The central forecourt was lined by the walls of the physics labs, the woodwork room, the chemistry and geography complex, the very old tin walled music shack, our very own swimming pool and finally a perimeter wall that separated the canteen from the forecourt.

Behind the swimming pool and music shack lay the top school playing field and sports equipment store, used also as the tuckshop.

The famous arched bridge with bright white railings linked the upper and lower schools.

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