Stockport Grammar School

Stockport Grammar School (SGS) was founded in 1487 by Sir Edmund Shaa, Lord Mayor of London — making it one of the oldest schools in England, predating Eton's foundation by half a century. The school was endowed under royal licence for the free education of boys of Stockport in grammar and Latin, and remained connected to the Goldsmiths' Company in London through Shaa's livery affiliation. SGS converted to independent fee-paying status in 1976 with the abolition of the Direct Grant and is today a co-educational HMC day school of around 1,500 pupils aged 3-18 on a single urban site in Stockport, Greater Manchester. The Head since 2023 is Sarah Capewell.

The school's most influential alumnus in twentieth-century science is Sir Frederic Calland Williams — known as "Freddie" Williams — who, after wartime radar work at the Telecommunications Research Establishment, returned to the University of Manchester and built the Manchester Baby (the Small-Scale Experimental Machine) in 1948. The Baby was the world's first electronic stored-program computer, and Williams's Williams–Kilburn tube provided the random-access memory that made all subsequent computing possible. Sir Horace Lamb, the applied mathematician whose Hydrodynamics remained the standard graduate text for decades, was also a pupil.

In the arts and entertainment SGS's alumni list is unusually varied: Geoff Downes, the rock keyboardist behind Yes, Asia and The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star; Marianne Elliott, the Tony Award-winning theatre director of Angels in America and War Horse; Paul Morley, the music journalist; and the novelist Abigail Dean (Girl A). The sportsman John Amaechi, a former NBA player and broadcast psychologist, was a pupil, as was the Himalayan mountaineer Peter Boardman (who died on Everest in 1982). Cecil Kimber, the founder of the MG car company, is also an Old Stopfordian.

The school's house system uses the names of historically associated families — Arden, Nicholson, Vernon and Warren — and operates a substantial bursary programme funded by Old Stopfordian donations through the Stockport Grammar School Foundation.