The Latin School
Wantage had a grammar school by the end of the sixteenth century. The school’s own history dates it to letters patent granted by Elizabeth I in 1597 for teaching grammar, funded from the town’s charitable lands. According to the Victoria County History, the school first used an old building in the churchyard, and a new ‘Latin School’ was put up in the churchyard between 1604 and the following years. Joseph Butler, the future Bishop of Durham, was taught there in the 1690s by the master, Philip Barton.
The school declined in the early nineteenth century and was discontinued in 1832.
King Alfred’s Grammar School
In 1849 Wantage celebrated the thousandth anniversary of Alfred’s birth, and the grammar school was revived under the name King Alfred’s Grammar School. William John Butler, the vicar and a governor of the Town Lands, took a close interest. New stone buildings on the Portway, designed by George Edmund Street in a thirteenth-century Gothic style, opened in 1850.
From grammar school to academy
In the 1980s the grammar school merged with the town’s two other secondary schools, Icknield (the school where the Icknield Way Morris Men began) and Segsbury, to form a single comprehensive. It was first called Wantage School and then, from 1987–88, King Alfred’s School, to keep the old name. It became a specialist sports college in the late 1990s and an academy in September 2011. The school has used several sites: the Centre site (the old grammar school), the West site (formerly Segsbury) and the East site (formerly Icknield), which closed in 2017 and was sold for housing.
Former pupils include the jockey Lester Piggott.
What to see
- Street’s 1850 grammar school buildings, Portway, part of the Centre site (school premises, not open to the public).
- Wantage churchyard, the site of the old Latin School.