Brookside House (Headington Junior School)
The present Junior Section of Headington School was originally a large private house called Brookside. The following extract from Jackson’s Oxford Journal of 16 October 1886 gives brief details about the origin of the building:
On the Highfield Estate, Headington-road, a new residence from designs by Messrs. Wilkinson and Moore, architects, has been erected for Mr T. Arnall. Mr Kingerlee of Oxford was the contractor.
The house was named Brookside after the Boundary Brook, which ran along the western edge of the house’s grounds and marked the old county and parliamentary boundary of Oxford. The map on the left shows the house and its estate in 1898.
The brook is now diverted underground from the north of the John Radcliffe via the gardens on the west side of Valentia Road to the Churchill Hospital area. As late as the 1930s it could be seen running beside the White Horse, under the London Road, and then through the gardens of 236/238 London Road. At that time the present cycle track outside the wall of Headington Junior School was an open ditch running into the brook.
The Yorkshireman Thomas Arnall, for whom the house was built, can be found living alone in this large house at the time of the 1891 census, with a housekeeper. Aged 57, he was then a widower and described as Head Postmaster for Oxford; by the time of the 1901 census, he was retired and still living alone with the same servant. He remained in the house until 1908. It was Arnall who started to build up what eventually became the Brookside Nurseries, as this extract from Jackson's Oxford Journal of 22 December 1888 shows:
The house had two other private occupants: Mrs Edwards from 1908 to 1911, and Robert Kent Tucker from 1911 to 1916.
In 1916 Headington School moved from White Lodge in Old Headington to Brookside House, and it was probably at this time that the Brookside Nurseries, which occupied the whole area of the road now called Brookside, became a separate enterprise.
In 1930, when the present main Headington School Building opened on the other side of the London Road, Brookside became the junior section of the school, as it is today. Rather confusingly, it was renamed Napier House, after the house in Pullen’s Lane built by Professor Arthur Napier (now Cotuit Hall) that the school had acquired in 1917 but sold when it moved into its new premises. The attached land was sold for development, and Brookside Nurseries moved across the London Road to the site now occupied by Franklin Road.