Berkhamsted School

Berkhamsted School traces its foundation to 1541, when John Incent — Dean of St Paul's Cathedral — endowed a free grammar school in the Hertfordshire market town of Berkhamsted under royal charter from King Henry VIII. The original Berkhamsted School ran as a boys' foundation; Berkhamsted School for Girls was established in 1888 as a separate institution. The present Berkhamsted School was formed in 1997 by the amalgamation of the boys' and girls' schools together with Berkhamsted Preparatory School; the merged institution was initially called Berkhamsted Collegiate School before reverting to the historic name in 2008. Subsequent acquisitions (Heatherton House School in 2011 and Haresfoot in 2012) created the Berkhamsted Schools Group of around 1,850 pupils aged 3-18.

Berkhamsted operates the Diamond Model — boys and girls are taught separately from Year 7 to Year 11 but share the same campus, sixth form, sport and extra-curricular programme. It is a member of the HMC, the GSA and IAPS. The current Principal is Richard Backhouse, previously Headmaster of Monmouth School.

Berkhamsted's most internationally celebrated alumna is the late Dame Zaha Hadid, who attended the school in the 1960s before reading mathematics at the American University of Beirut. Hadid became the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2004); her buildings include the London Aquatics Centre, the MAXXI museum in Rome and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku.

In literature the school produced Graham Greene, whose father Charles Greene was Headmaster of Berkhamsted from 1910 to 1927. Graham Greene grew up on the campus and the school appears thinly disguised in several of his novels; his memoir A Sort of Life describes the experience. His brother Sir Hugh Greene was Director-General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969 — the period in which Doctor Who and Cathy Come Home were commissioned.

The school's broader alumni list includes Clementine Churchill, Baroness Spencer-Churchill (wife of Sir Winston); the round-the-world yachtsman Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first person to sail solo non-stop around the globe; the composer Alexander Goehr, who gave the BBC Reith Lectures in 1987; the early-twentieth-century mountaineer H. W. Tilman; the actor Stephen Campbell Moore (The History Boys); and the planetary scientist Suzie Imber. Berkhamsted operates a substantial bursary programme and remains one of Hertfordshire's leading independent schools.