Latymer Upper School and Latymer Prep

Latymer Upper School derives from the 1624 charitable bequest of Edward Latymer, a wealthy English legal official who endowed a scholarship for poor boys of Hammersmith and Edmonton. The bequest also founded The Latymer School (the state grammar in Edmonton). Latymer Upper opened on its present King Street site in Hammersmith in 1895 and operated as a direct grant grammar in the mid-twentieth century before becoming a wholly private day school with the abolition of the direct grant in 1976. It admitted girls to the Sixth Form from 1996 and became fully co-educational in the first decade of the 2000s. It is a member of the HMC, the GSA and IAPS.

The school today educates around 1,284 pupils aged 7-18 across Latymer Upper and the on-site Latymer Prep. It is consistently in the top tier of London independent schools by A-Level performance and Oxbridge offer numbers. The Head since 2021 is Susan Wijeratna, formerly Head of Queen Anne's School Caversham.

Latymer's alumni list is unusually weighted towards the screen and stage. Hugh Grant, the BAFTA-winning star of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, About a Boy and Paddington 2, was a Latymer pupil in the 1970s. Alan Rickman — Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Severus Snape in Harry Potter — was a Latymer pupil in the 1960s. The comedian and director Mel Smith (Alas Smith and Jones; the director of Bean) was a contemporary. More recently the actresses Lily Cole, Imogen Poots and Ophelia Lovibond all attended. In music, the Mercury Prize-winning singer-songwriter Arlo Parks and the Cash Money Records pop star Jay Sean (Down) are both Latymer alumni; the record producer Walter Legge, founder of the Philharmonia Orchestra, was an earlier Old Latymerian.

Elsewhere the school's alumni span science (the Astronomer Royal Sir Harold Spencer Jones; the plate-tectonics co-discoverer Fred Vine), cuisine (Heston Blumenthal OBE, owner of the three-Michelin-star Fat Duck) and code-breaking (Jerry Roberts, who worked on the Tunny / Lorenz cipher at Bletchley Park alongside Bill Tutte and Max Newman). Latymer's combination of academic depth, strong creative pipeline and direct Thames-side location make it one of west London's most influential independent schools.