City of London School

City of London School (CLS) traces its foundation to 1442, when John Carpenter, the Town Clerk of London, endowed a school in his will for the education of four poor boys from the City. Carpenter's endowment was administered for almost 400 years by the City of London Corporation before being supplemented in 1834 by a formal Act of Parliament (the Establishment of Honey Lane Market School Act) that created the modern City of London School on its first dedicated site at Milk Street. The school moved to its current riverside campus on the Thames Embankment in 1986, occupying a striking Postmodern building designed by Cassidy Taggart Partnership immediately beside the Millennium Bridge and directly opposite Tate Modern. CLS is boys-only, ages 10-18, with around 1,074 pupils. The Head Master is Alan Bird.

CLS is one of three schools funded by the City's Cash — the historic endowment fund of the City of London Corporation, dating back to medieval times — along with the City of London School for Girls (founded 1894) and the City of London Freemen's School (founded 1854). The school is a member of the HMC. Academic performance places CLS consistently in the very top tier of UK independent schools by Oxbridge offer numbers; the school's mathematics and physics programmes produce regular UKMT and Olympiad qualifiers.

The school's alumni list runs through the central history of modern British public life. The most senior recent figure is H. H. Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith — Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916, the introducer of the People's Budget (1909), the Parliament Act 1911 and the Liberal welfare reforms that laid the foundation for the modern British state. Asquith attended CLS in the 1860s before reading Greats at Balliol College, Oxford. In the law, Lord Bingham of Cornhill — Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales and senior Law Lord — was an Old Citizen.

In the arts, Sir Daniel Day-Lewis — the only actor to have won three Academy Awards for Best Actor (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, Lincoln) — attended CLS briefly in the early 1970s, son of the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. Dame Patricia Routledge DBE, the BAFTA-winning actress of Keeping Up Appearances (Hyacinth Bucket) and West End musical theatre, also briefly attended.

In sport: Mike Brearley OBE, the former England Test cricket captain (Ashes-winning 1981) and later sports writer and psychotherapist. In music: Sir Mick Jagger briefly attended CLS as a child before transferring to Dartford Grammar. In international business: Aristotle Onassis was a CLS pupil for a short period in the inter-war years. The school operates substantial bursary provision via the City's Cash, intended to preserve John Carpenter's 1442 commitment to educational access for boys regardless of family means.