Kingswood School, Bath

Kingswood School was founded in 1748 by John Wesley — founder of Methodism and one of the most influential Anglican Christian leaders of the eighteenth century — making it the oldest Methodist school in the world. Wesley founded the school originally at Kingswood near Bristol to educate the sons of his itinerant Methodist preachers, but the school relocated in 1851 to its present hillside campus at Lansdown in Bath, immediately above the historic Roman city and with views across the Avon valley. The Headmaster is Andrew Gordon-Brown.

Kingswood became fully co-educational in 1978 and today educates around 894 pupils ages 9-18 with a substantial boarding population. The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association and maintains its founding Methodist connection through the Methodist Independent Schools Trust.

The school's most internationally significant alumnus is Sir Bernard Lovell OBE FRS — the radio astronomer who founded the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire in 1945 and oversaw the construction in 1957 of the world's then-largest steerable radio telescope, the Mark I (now Lovell) Telescope at Jodrell Bank. Lovell's telescope was the principal Western tracking instrument for the early Soviet space programme, tracking Sputnik 1 in October 1957 and Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 in April 1961; it remains in active scientific use today as part of the e-MERLIN VLBI network. Lovell was knighted in 1961 for his services to astronomy.

The actor Jeremy Northam — Mr Knightley in Douglas McGrath's Emma (1996), Roland Mitchell in Possession, and Sir Thomas More in Showtime's The Tudors — was an Old Kingswoodian. The Edwardian surgeon Sir Frederick Treves, 1st Baronet — physician and surgeon to King Edward VII, and the doctor of Joseph Merrick (the so-called "Elephant Man", whose story Treves recorded in his 1923 The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences) — was educated at Kingswood. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Methodist Independent Schools Trust.