Ibstock Place School

Ibstock Place School was founded in 1894 by the educational pioneer Esther Lawrence as one of the early-Edwardian generation of London independent girls' schools. The school took its name from its first site at Ibstock Place, Roehampton, in south-west London. From 1933 to 1958 it was led by Barbara Priestman, who developed the school into a leading London girls' school of the inter-war period. Ibstock Place became co-educational in the late twentieth century and is today an HMC day school of around 1,048 pupils aged 3-18 on its 10-acre Roehampton campus, set among the Roehampton estates and adjacent to the Roehampton University. The Headmaster is Christopher Wolsey, who took up the post in 2020.

Ibstock Place is a member of the HMC. The school's modern alumni list reads as a particularly representative cross-section of late-twentieth-century British cultural life, with an unusual concentration of celebrity children alongside genuinely distinguished writers, actors and politicians.

In literature, Dame Iris Murdoch DBE — the Booker Prize-winning novelist and Oxford philosopher whose novels include The Sea, The Sea (Booker, 1978), The Bell, A Severed Head and Under the Net — was educated at Ibstock Place in the 1920s before reading classics at Somerville College, Oxford. Mary Berry CBE, the food writer and former Great British Bake Off judge, was educated at Ibstock Place; her contemporary Nigella Lawson, the food writer and television cook, was a pupil decades later.

In film and theatre, the BAFTA-winning actress Emily Blunt — A Quiet Place, The Devil Wears Prada, Mary Poppins Returns, Oppenheimer — was educated at Ibstock Place in the 1990s before her film career began with My Summer of Love. The actress, singer and model Suki Waterhouse is a more recent Old Ibstockian; the actresses Martha Hunt and Georgia May Jagger (Sir Mick Jagger's daughter), the model Tilly Ramsay (Gordon Ramsay's daughter), and the musician Jesse Wood (Ronnie Wood's son) are among the school's celebrity alumni cohort. In politics: Nadhim Zahawi MP, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and former Education Secretary. The school operates a substantial bursary programme.