Crookham Court Manor School has been abandoned since 1989. It was shut down after it was at the centre of a series of high-profile child abuse cases.
“The school was the subject of a 1988 BBC investigation for the television programme That’s Life which led to three members of staff being convicted of sexual abuse. In 1990 the owner of the school, Philip Cadman, was sentenced to ten years in prison after a trial at Reading Crown Court.
French teacher, William Printer, was convicted of two counts of indecent assault and one attempted serious sexual assault, and was imprisoned for 10 years at the same trial. Cadman’s and Printer’s sentences were both reduced to six years on appeal. Anthony Edmonds, who taught English at the school, was jailed for six years after admitting to four charges of serious sexual assault and seven charges of indecent assault. In 2012 a fourth member of staff was convicted of four counts of indecent assault. Mark Standish was found guilty of incidents which took place between 1988 and 1989. The original manor, near Thatcham, was built in 1729. The house was demolished in the early 19th century and the current buildings were built on same site in 1850.”
The Explore
This was another explore that we went to just because we had to drive right past it. We had been told that the majority of the building had been pulled down and development had already started. When we finally made our way through the woods to the site I couldn’t have been more disappointed to see only half the building and scaffold around the whole lot. There was a large area where the main building once stood which was completely flat and only a small section of the site remained.
What was still left was empty and stripped out and I cant help feeling we missed the boat on this one, as I have seen some amazing pictures of the inside from a few years ago with all the old books in the library and lots of old bits of history still left dotted around the school. Unfortunately we only had a look around what little there was remaining and left sharpish as there was security a few feet away in a caravan pumping shite music. We knew we had to cut our losses with this one, as it was mostly demolished and not worth the hassle of being caught as we had other places to get to.
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