Sunbury Manor School

This site was a quite productive smallholding (in medieval times of the locally great manor fields) in which sat a rather large house by the 1870s. In 1881 this house, as Mount Pleasant, which had earlier been a private school, was bought by the Good Templars and Temperance (educational) Orphanage - a time in the height of Victorian Britain when purchase by a broad range of well-benefacted charities became possible. It took earlier premises in 1874 for the children of total abstainers of alcohol. It educated usually about 30-40 pupils. The site was to be named (by 1894 and thereafter) Marion Park, featuring a long rectangular pond to its east. The orphanage became conspicuously under-used…