School Facilities

The Alington Hall, built in 1905, is a well-proportioned elegant hall complete with a large stage area and balcony – the hall is the largest of its kind in Shropshire (550 capacity) – and regularly hosts concerts, receptions, lectures and presentations including the eagerly anticipated whole-school House Singing competition - the musical highlight of the Michaelmas Term.

The Art School is centrally located on the school site and is a wonderful building with many large and light studio spaces and two galleries for exhibitions of pupils’ work and visiting artists. There is also a lecture theatre for talks and workshops by visiting artists, photographers and art historians.

The Biology Department enjoys outstandingly good facilities – modern laboratories for ten specialist teachers, excellent microscopes and other apparatus, and also a natural history museum with a wealth of specimens for a school. The aim of the department is to embrace the best of traditional biology – the historic specimens in the museum and dissection work in lessons for example – as well as modern advances such as DNA fingerprinting, genetic engineering and data logging allowing pupils to follow in the footsteps of 'Father of Evolution' and Old Salopian Charles Darwin.

Take our virtual reality tour around the top floor of the Darwin building, which has been put together by Biology teacher Henry Exham. You can explore the stairwell, Lab A and Lab B and the natural history museum.

Use your mouse to explore to move around the spaces and click on the icons to hear audio descriptions or read more about the specimens or move to another room. For a fully immersive experience, view this using a VR viewer such as Google Cardboard.

The Chapel is at the heart of the School – literally and metaphorically.

When the School moved to its present site from the town centre, the Chapel was one of the first buildings to be constructed; the architect was Sir Arthur Blomfield. The first service took place on the 4th of November 1883.

Choir stalls, designed by Luke Hughes and Co of Covent Garden with their array of spirit burning choir lights covered in gold leaf, give the choir an elevated position to lead our Sunday worship. A magnificent series of abstract ceramics fitted to the wood panelling of the nave walls and to the front of the gallery was commissioned from Victoria Dark.

The reredos of Christ on the road to Emmaus and this late Victorian sculpture is flanked by six saints – Francis, Caecelia, John, Chad, Winifred and Nicholas. These frescoes set against a sea of gold leaf were commissioned by Aidan Hart, Britain’s leading icon painter in June of 2007.  

Take a virtual reality tour of the stunning chapel using our 360 tour below.

The Chatri Design Centre houses three multi-media design studios and a superbly stocked multi-material workshop, including Computer-Aided Design software modelling, a CNC milling machine and lathe, laser-cutting and high-quality 3D printing facilities. These wonderful spaces mean that fundamentally traditional research, drafting, sketching and material fabrication are happily residing alongside cutting-edge technologies.

The ICT and Computing Faculty also take up residence on the first floor with two full-sized computer rooms and a smaller WiFi-only teaching room. A new generation of giant touch-screen displays at the front of each classroom helps present material to and from pupils.

Shrewsbury is one of the country's strongest schools in Eton Fives, which is a major sport in the Lent Term. The school has 14 Fives courts (refurbished in 2009) and regularly hosts major tournaments including the National Schools Championships. The sport is popular, with up to 150 boys and girls playing it on any given day.

Meals at Shrewsbury are taken in our purpose-built catering hall, Kingsland Hall ('KH'), where pupils choose from a wide variety of foods from our self-service counters and then eat with their friends and tutors from their House.

Kingsland Hall features state of the art servery counters, a 'Theatre Kitchen' section which will have a chef cooking speciality dishes at lunch & supper, and a specific salad island, plus lighting that can change at each mealtime to suit the time of day.

Almost all of our food is cooked from scratch, using fresh ingredients and local suppliers wherever possible. We happily cater for pupils with special dietary needs such as allergies, dairy/lactose intolerance, gluten-free diets and halal food.

Arguably one of the most recognisable buildings of Shrewsbury School, Main School Building is the focal point of the school’s entrance, known as ‘Central’.  A former hospital built in 1763, the building was bought by Shrewsbury School in 1878 and architectural embellishments were later added, including the clock turret.

Situated behind our statue of Charles Darwin, Main School Building – or MSB as it is commonly known – is home to a number of classrooms where English, Maths, Languages and Politics are taught. It also features the Common Room, where teachers gather for weekly briefings and to discuss the school’s successes and schedule of events for the coming week.

Overlooking Shrewsbury’s Quarry Park, MSB sits tall and boasts incredible views across the town from the Queen’s Terrace, which was officially opened by Her Majesty The Queen during a visit in 1952 to celebrate the school’s 400^th birthday.

The Moser Library was originally opened in 1916. Following a major refurbishment programme by an Old Salopian, the Library became a modern independent learning environment while still preserving the heritage of the original building and was reopened in September 2017.

The Library provides access to approximately 40,000 print books, 500 e-books, and a selection of print and online magazines and newspapers.

The Moser Library has a variety of study spaces to accommodate different styles of study. The desks have been carefully designed to provide task lighting and integral sockets so that students have the space to use both print and online resources. In each of the study zones, there are comfortable leather armchairs to encourage students to curl up and read.

We are fortunate to have a wonderful collection of ancient books. The value and fragility of these artefacts meant that they were previously housed in locked rooms to which students had only limited access. We now have very prominent display cabinets in the Churchill’s Room, which are purpose-built to protect and display some of the treasures.

The Moser Gallery displays a variety of historic artefacts – from First Edition copies of Darwin’s 'On the Origin of the Species' to 19th Century watercolours left to the Library by Edward Moser, who gave the building its name.  Specially designed picture storage, which protects the watercolours from light and theft, means that the Gallery is now always open and provides additional, inspirational study space.

There is also a Group Study Room available that students can use for group projects, and staff can book for meetings and seminars.

Quod, formally the school’s swimming pool, is now our comfortable common room for Lower and Upper Sixth Form pupils.

Pupils can visit Quod during break times, and it is often used for their social time on the weekend, including open mic nights and house parties.

Quod is also home to various school events; from Careers Fairs to Charity fundraisers, it’s an excellent space that can be used for many occasions throughout the school year.

Located outside the sixth form building is an area known as Moser’s Quod, which features benches that can be utilised for outside learning or socialising at break times, and the famous Oliver’s Egg. It commemorates E. Oliver, who combined the roles of caretaker and groundsman, including the care of the school horse, between 1882 and 1932. In this area he had at one time created an egg-shaped lawn, always known as Oliver's Egg.

Boasting some of the leading sporting facilities in the country, Shrewsbury is able to cater for a varied range of sports teams and clubs and has hosted a number of national professional teams.

As well as the elite-level playing fields, dedicated boathouse and indoor cricket centre, our sports centre facilities include: 

• Four-court squash club including cafe/bar area.
• A 27m x 17m three-court sports hall catering for a range of sports including badminton, indoor football, basketball and circuit training.
• Cardiovascular and weight suites.
• 25m, six-lane, deck-level swimming pool.

The Gemini swimming pool opened for use in 2007. It is a 25m x 12.5m deck level pool with six lanes, 1.2m depth in the shallow end and 2m depth in the deep end. The benefits of a deck level pool are that water spills over the edge of the pool and does not rebound back into the middle of the pool. This eliminates choppiness and rough water which makes it ideal for learning to swim, for serious swimming training, and it also ensures fast times in competitive races. 

The pool is available for use as much as possible for all Salopians, including early morning swimming sessions, general lane swimming and serious swim training for School swimmers. The pool is also a vital resource for all keen sportsmen and women, who use it for conditioning sessions and as part of active recovery (after intensive training or competition), as well as for pupils recovering from injury.

The Ancient Library of Shrewsbury School was founded in 1606 by the Headmaster John Meighen, in partial fulfilment of the development plan laid down in Thomas Ashton's Ordinances of 1578. It was housed in a purpose-designed building built in 1595, in a room fitted out with presses and chained like a contemporary Oxford or Cambridge college library. Above it was a walking gallery intended for mathematical and astronomical instruments.

The first acquisition was in 1596, a terrestrial globe by the first English globe maker Emery Molineux. The library grew quickly by gift, bequest and purchase, and the stock was always intended to include all learning, not merely the limited grammar school syllabus. It was thematically catalogued from the outset and its growth can be gauged from accession rolls, donor's books and successive catalogues. The chains were removed in 1737 when it became a borrowing library.

Before 1640 the school acquired some forty medieval manuscripts, most of which survive, including a fine twelfth-century Gradual from Haughmond Abbey and the Lichfield Processional with its unique liturgical English plays of circa 1430 and polyphonic music. Particular treasures are a fine collection of bookbindings ranging from the twelfth century to the present day, some sixty books printed before 1500 including John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' printed by Caxton in 1483, and a representative collection of seventeenth-century scientific, medical and natural history books, mostly drawn from the libraries of two Shrewsbury doctors and bequeathed in 1688 and 1712. The school bought Newton's 'Principia' on publication in 1687.

In 1766 the Revd. Dr John Taylor, ex Cambridge don, Old Salopian and eminent Greek scholar, bequeathed his library of some 3,500 books to the school, more than doubling the size of the library. His collection is particularly rich in works relating to Roman antiquities in Italy, Greek authors and English antiquarianism. His manuscripts were bequeathed elsewhere, with the exception of a remarkable Elizabethan town chronicle for Shrewsbury known as 'Dr. Taylor's MS'. His collection has always been kept as an entity, and since 1966 has given its name to the whole Ancient Library.

The library also includes books, manuscripts and letters of Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler.