Mill Hill School Foundation

Mill Hill School is a co-educational independent day and boarding school for ages 13-18, set on a 120-acre campus in Mill Hill village in the London Borough of Barnet. It was founded in January 1807 by a committee of Nonconformist merchants and ministers — including the theologian John Pye-Smith — who deliberately located the school a safe distance from central London because of the perceived "dangers both physical and moral" of the early-nineteenth-century city. The original Mill Hill Grammar School educated about twenty boys in a residence that had once belonged to the eighteenth-century botanist Peter Collinson. From those Nonconformist roots the school grew into one of the principal HMC day-and-boarding establishments in north London.

Mill Hill today is fully co-educational and operates twelve houses. Its 120-acre site — set high on the ridge of Mill Hill — gives the school the largest contiguous campus inside Greater London after Eton's relocation suburb. The current Head is David Benson, who took up the post in 2017 after deputy headships at Eton and Westminster.

The school's most famous alumnus is Francis Crick, who was at Mill Hill in the 1930s before reading physics at University College London and going on, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, to win the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Other Old Millhillians span the arts, public life and sport. Sir Norman Hartnell, the couturier who designed Queen Elizabeth II's wedding gown and coronation robes, was a pupil. So were the broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, the actor Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor in Doctor Who), the actor Harry Melling (The Queen's Gambit, Harry Potter) and the newspaper proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, Baron Lebedev. Sir Denis Thatcher, husband of the Prime Minister, also attended.

The international alumni list is notable for a relatively small school: Sajith Premadasa, the current Leader of the Opposition in Sri Lanka, was educated at Mill Hill, as was the late Lord Toulson of the UK Supreme Court. The school is a member of the HMC and the BSA, and operates a substantial scholarships and bursaries programme.