School portraits / City of London School, 1988, and a reunion years later
Put on the Stairs in 1988, Temporarily
Two sixth-formers parked an antique telescope at the top of City of London School’s main stairs until it found a better home. Our hall has a rowing machine in the same position.
In 1988 two sixth-formers at City of London School put a large antique telescope at the top of the main concourse stairs. Temporarily. An old friend of theirs went back recently and found it still there, and nobody he asked knew why.
I know all this because one of the two, Keith Eyeons, Class of 1989, has written it up for the school’s e-news. I read it twice, as a legal document, because there is a rowing machine in our hall that went there temporarily in March 2019.
The backstory has the shape of every project in our house. The school moved into its building on Queen Victoria Street in 1986 with an ambition: an observatory on the roof. Dr Tim Metham, chemistry teacher and Master-in-Charge of the Astronomical Society, acquired a telescope for it, and the telescope sat in a shop waiting for its home to be built. The observatory was dropped. Eyeons can only guess at why: planning rules near St Paul’s, perhaps, or the prospect of pupils on a roof after dark.
We are the same. We buy the telescope. We never build the roof.
By 1988 Eyeons and his friend were joint chairmen of the society, and they did the sensible thing with an instrument that had nowhere to go. They put it somewhere nobody could miss it, in the hope that being seen every day would shame someone into finding it a better home.
It is a sound plan. It is also my plan for the rowing machine, which sits where my husband has to step over it twice a day, so that he will feel the reproach and find it a better home. He has found it a job. It is a towel rail.
The school has other objects that have outlasted the plans made for them. Steve Lewington taught design and technology there from 1986 to 2024, and his favourite project was a wooden box. Pupils arrived having previously engineered things in paper, card and spaghetti, learned to measure, saw and finish, and took home something that, he said, represented them. It usually became their mother’s jewellery box.
Our eldest made a box in Year 8, at a school with no telescope at all. It came home as intended. It now holds a dead watch battery, three keys to nothing and the receipt for the rowing machine.
So there it stands in the City: a telescope bought for a roof that never happened, parked on the stairs in 1988, still waiting for its better home in full view of everybody.
I showed my husband the article as proof that temporary things become permanent if you hold your nerve. He read it to the end, said it was a lovely story, and carried the rowing machine to the top of our stairs.
Sources
- A telescopic legacy
- Steve Lewington
- Latest e-news — 2026 summer term
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column