Shrewsbury School

Shrewsbury School was founded in 1552 by royal charter of Edward VI as a Tudor grammar school in the Shropshire county town of Shrewsbury. The school operated in the medieval town centre on Castle Street for over three hundred years before relocating in 1882 to its present 150-acre rural campus at Kingsland on the south bank of the River Severn, across the river from the medieval town. The Headmaster is Leo Winkley. Shrewsbury was one of the original "Nine Great Schools" of England as named in the Clarendon Commission of 1864.

Shrewsbury became co-educational in 2014 — relatively late among the major HMC boarding schools — and today educates around 826 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association.

The school's most internationally significant alumnus is Charles Darwin FRS — the Shrewsbury-born naturalist whose On the Origin of Species (1859) introduced the theory of evolution by natural selection and produced the single most consequential scientific revolution since Newton. Darwin attended Shrewsbury School from 1818 to 1825, where he was famously bored by the classical curriculum and devoted his time to chemistry experiments in a garden shed at the family home ("the Mount" in Shrewsbury). Darwin's Shrewsbury connection is preserved in the school's Darwin Library and the Darwin statue in the school grounds.

The Elizabethan poet, soldier and statesman Sir Philip Sidney — author of Astrophil and Stella (the first English sonnet sequence after Petrarch) and Arcadia, and who died gloriously at the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, giving his water bottle to a dying common soldier with the words "thy necessity is greater than mine" — was a Shrewsbury boy. In post-war politics, Sir Michael Heseltine, Baron Heseltine of Thenford — Conservative Cabinet minister, the man who walked out of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet over the 1986 Westland helicopter affair and ultimately ran against her in the 1990 leadership election that brought her down, later Deputy Prime Minister under John Major — was a Shrewsbury boy. The novelist Nevil Shute — On the Beach (the canonical 1957 nuclear-war novel), A Town Like Alice — was an Old Salopian.

The Royal Shrewsbury School Boat Club, founded in 1866, is the third-oldest rowing club in the world (after the Leander Club at Henley and the Oxford University Boat Club) and produces a strong rowing programme that has placed Old Salopian oarsmen on multiple GB Olympic crews. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Shrewsbury Foundation.