Pitkennedy School Restoration Home

Once we walked through that gate we were hooked.

When I look at that house, I just think wow.

And every time I see it I'm just, like, wow!

It's a castle, it's a castle!

How can you NOT buy a castle?

Wow, that's some fireplace.

It's going to be an amazing home.

First day of the rest of its life. You happy?

We are way, way, way over budget.

I mean, I am actually living in a building site.

You have to make sacrifices.

There are days when you just think have we made the right decision?

Are we doing the right thing?

I wanted to know what it looked like when it was first built.

This is just such a beautiful place.

It's like every romantic part of my brain is just firing.

You don't have any idea of how much money this is going to cost you.

I don't think either of us envisaged

quite as big a project as we've actually taken on.

It's still a dream. It's still a dream that we're actually doing it.

I can't wait to move in. It seemed just to take forever.

It's just a nightmare.

I'm telling myself not to worry, because what can I do?

I've got to finish the house.

This is Pitkennedy School.

For years it served the hamlet of Pitkennedy in Angus

on Scotland's east coast.

Nearly 150 years of memories are within these walls.

Eight generations of children learned to read and write here

and, although their books are still on the shelves,

the classrooms are silent.

The bell rang for the last time seven years ago

and since then it's been left to crumble.

The flat roof leaks and inside the plaster is rotting away.

It's now in such a bad condition that one more Scottish winter

and it might be beyond saving.

Fortunately, best friends Charlotte Fleming and Helen McGregor loved

this quirky building so much,

they were able to look beyond its current state of repair.

My overwhelming impression was that it was grey and dreary

and depressing, and then I went into the south classroom

and saw the light and the view, and that sold it.

My first impressions were just how spacious and light it was,

and what fabulous windows.

The dream of creating a home together

started for advertising copywriter Charlotte and odd-job lady Helen

when they met at choir practice five years ago.

After bringing up two children as a single mother, Helen was living in

rented accommodation,

while Charlotte owned a small bungalow nearby.

But a love for fascinating old buildings

meant that it didn't take long for them

to pool their resources to attempt to create their forever home.

We're both getting rather, you know, old...

SHE CHUCKLES

..so we started talking about buying somewhere together.

But the challenge of transforming Pitkennedy into a home is two-fold.

Firstly, there's money.

While an inheritance has allowed Charlotte

and Helen to buy the school building,

the amount won't cover the costs of the restoration,

so Charlotte will have to sell her bungalow to pay for it.

The thing that's still worrying me is, frankly, the finance,

because we don't know how much it's going to cost.

The money is, for me,

the big headache.

The second and perhaps even trickier problem is that of actually

transforming the school building, with its cloakrooms and classrooms,

into a comfortable home to live in.

Even the very basics, such as a kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms

will have to be created from scratch.

I don't see any reason why it can't be turned into a house.

Both of us have the ability I think, the knack, to make a home anywhere.

Not only do Charlotte and Helen not have the money

to complete this restoration,

but also, despite being complete novices at the building game,

they have decided to do much of the restoration work themselves.

We will be learning on the job,

but hopefully not with any disastrous consequences.

Helen and Charlotte's desire to do a good job with Pitkennedy

is about more than simply making a home for themselves.

Finding a school diary ignited their passion for its history as well.

It starts in 1916 on the 13th March,

and it goes right through till the school closed

in June 2005.

This record stretches back to the earliest living memory

of Pitkennedy, but Charlotte and Helen would

love to fill in the blanks right back to the school's inception.

In pencil we've put in an addendum that on the 16th April 2012,

we bought the school for conversion to a house.

Charlotte and Helen's ambitious plan to save Pitkennedy will keep

the two classrooms intact.

One, a living room and one as a large kitchen-diner

and open up the modern extension to create a downstairs bathroom

and studies for each of them.

But the key to their plan is to replace the modern flat roof

with a pitched roof, thus opening up a new first floor to create

three bedrooms and a family bathroom.

Linking the existing space

and the new upstairs rooms will be a brand-new staircase

and the success of this entire project depends on whether Helen and

Charlotte can effectively transform Pitkennedy School into a home.

I don't think either of us

envisaged quite as big a project as we've actually taken on.

But yeah, we're...

looking forward to it now.

And now it's time for me to see Pitkennedy School for myself.

I'm Charlotte.

Charlotte, hello. Caroline. Lovely to meet you. I'm Helen.

Hello, lovely to meet you. You too.

And your new home. Yes. Yes.

It's a big building, and it looks tired even from here.

So, you've got work to do, haven't you? Yes.

And what about who's handling the finances?

We spend it, she looks after it.

And here comes the really vile question.

What did you pay for the schoolhouse? 60,000.

Do you know what your total spend's going to be?

What's your budget to spend on the building?

No, we don't, because every single person who comes

and looks to give us an estimate says, "Hmm."

So, welcome to the school.

Yes, indeed.

Gosh.

I'm just wondering, because it's always been a school,

how it's going to function as a living space.

The stairs are going here,

and they'll have to cut a hole in that bit of ceiling.

Your stairs will come down here, this will be your hall,

and then this room I can see is going to be your sitting room.

Uh-huh. There's a lot of stuff in here.

The stuff around here was left behind by the school.

They just walked out and left it? Yep.

Do you think, when you're living here,

people are going to feel the urge to come and knock on your door?

Oh, they already do. They already do. They do?

Yeah, yeah, we've had two or three of them come in. Three so far.

How do they feel about you turning it into a home?

I think they're really relieved

that something's actually going to happen to it.

A lot have said,

"We didn't think anything was ever going to be done with the place."

It was just going to be allowed to fall down.

A lot of people buy somewhere,

really ostensibly for doing it up and selling it on.

Is that part of your plan? No. No. Absolutely not. No, no.

No, no, we've got plans. This is it.

We know exactly where the stairlift's going.

THEY LAUGH

And another classroom,

a lovely classroom.

'In addition to all the school stuff left behind,

'since Helen moved out of her rented accommodation

'and in with Charlotte,

'Pitkennedy is now home to all her belongings too.'

'Working around all this is yet one more thing that will make

'this renovation a real challenge.'

You've just had your permission to get going. Yep.

How are you feeling about the next couple of weeks?

Hugely relieved that we can actually start.

'I've barely left the building

'before Charlotte and Helen don hard hats and set about

'demolishing the school cloakroom walls.'

Helen and Charlotte have finally begun their battle to revive

Pitkennedy, so now it's time for us

to start our investigations into its history.

Dr Kate Williams will scour the archives to discover

the origins and significance of this isolated rural school.

Whilst our architectural expert Kieran Long

will look behind the ugly modern facade

to discover if this school has hidden architectural merit.

It's got all of that character of a rugged, rural building.

You know, this is a farming community in the 19th century,

and this is the seat of learning, and the building,

although it's quite plain, has that kind of dignity, you know,

it has these stone dressings around the roofline.

Yeah, you can see so much craftsmanship in this wall.

I love this wall, it's really, really exciting architecturally.

There's a real master mason at work here.

The discovery of a master mason's handiwork proves the school

is well built, but Kieran is keen to know

if there is an equal quality of design at Pitkennedy.

These windows are rather charming. Look at the scale of them.

There's so much light coming in from there. And of course,

the most interesting thing is that the sill height is above my head,

let alone the head height of a child. There's no child going to see

in or out of that window, it's all about allowing light to flood in.

So, you know, there's definitely a kind of purpose behind this window.

But to prove the effectiveness of that design,

Kieran has to venture inside.

Now this is just such a bright room, isn't it? It's got, you know,

windows all along this south facade.

I've got, like, a little desk here and a chair which helps me

to test my prediction,

and you know, if I was the height of a child, I would just be missing

the tops of the hills. I'm here, all I've got is sky and my school books

to concentrate on, no distractions at all, so it really is working.

It's didactic, it's telling me, "Learn, don't look out the window."

Children will never again crowd into these classrooms to be

taught, but the clever design details that Kieran has uncovered

will survive if Helen and Charlotte succeed with the restoration.

The last-ever headmistress, Susan Steele, is keen to take a final

look at the school before Charlotte and Helen turn it into a home.

This was the front classroom,

or the south classroom as it was known, and this was my classroom.

Susan taught here for 17 years

and it's clear that her time at the school was very precious to her.

Through here...

..was the staff room.

I actually used to have a little snooze in here at lunchtime.

I was sad that the school was closing.

Um...

..and in some ways, um...

..it made it easier for me to leave as a head teacher knowing there wouldn't be a head teacher after me,

because this was mine.

For the build, the priority is to get the flat roof watertight

and for that, Helen and Charlotte need scaffolding.

It's not often I get up at six o'clock in the morning

really excited. Today was one of those days!

Once the scaffolding is up, work on the vital new roof can begin.

That roof is very important. I mean, it's going to be part of our

living space apart from anything else, but the most important thing

is that it's going to get rid of the buckets in the hall.

SHE LAUGHS

Anybody who was in any doubt that something was happening with

the school will not be in any doubt at all after today.

First day of the rest of its life.

By renovating Pitkennedy,

Charlotte and Helen have taken on a big responsibility. Almost everyone

living in this part of Angus has a connection with the school.

I was the school dinner lady for a while,

and I was the school cleaner for a while.

I was here for seven years, in one classroom, with one teacher.

When I started, there were 11 pupils in the school

and when I finished there were about 18, I think.

It's sad that it's not a school,

but it's better that something happens to it.

Over the years, many generations of the same family would have attended Pitkennedy.

Just across the road from the school lives 101-year-old Susan Bailey

who started school in 1918,

yet still has very vivid memories of her time there.

Aye, the school dinners.

The school dinners? Aye.

It was just soup.

It was made in a big boiler at the back.

But I didn't have it very often because I just lived

so near the school.

I was the next generation after Auntie Susie, and then my sons went,

and then my grandchildren would have gone if they hadn't closed it.

You enjoyed the school, did you?

Yes, of course. It was great.

Learned to do the Highland Fling. Can you do the Highland Fling?

It's amazing to hear the personal testimony from people who

experienced Pitkennedy first-hand.

But we want to explore its history beyond living memory.

Kate is beginning her quest 500 miles away in London.

The school was constructed around 1850, at a time

when the national government in London was beginning to take an interest in formal education.

Is it possible that, at the Houses of Parliament Archive,

our tiny school in rural Scotland is officially documented?

I'm here in the Parliamentary Archives

because even though education wasn't compulsory in the mid-19th century,

money was being spent and records were being kept.

What I found here are the reports of the inspectorate,

and these are the financial reports,

and there is a mention here of the Pitkennedy School.

This report tells us a lot about the school,

what kind of school it was, and indeed, what kind of school

it wasn't, because essentially, it's a subscription school.

A subscription school wasn't a private school

paid for by the pupils, it wasn't a church school paid for

by the church, it was paid for by the money from the local grandee,

so essentially, local dignitaries dug deep into their pockets

and gave the money for a school to be built and a school to be pursued.

Finding such detailed accounts of our rural Scottish

school in the archives of the Houses of Parliament shows that this

really was the start of an education revolution that changed our nation.

And discovering that Pitkennedy itself was a subscription school

paid for by philanthropy means that Kate's next step

is clear - find the name of the mystery philanthropist.

Back at Pitkennedy, work has started in earnest

with builder Alan and his team beginning crucial elements

of the transformation from school into home.

There's two operations going on today.

In the main roof, we're cutting out for the veluxes.

The veluxes will go in today.

On this side, we're making an opening through

from the existing house into what will be the new part of the house.

All going to plan and if the weather stays fine, we'll have it done today.

Like almost everyone nearby,

Alan has a personal stake in the survival of Pitkennedy.

My mother-in-law went to this school.

I have been told to make sure we do a good job of it.

Kieran has already discovered evidence of an architect's hand

in the design of the school building,

but has no idea who it actually was.

The National Archives in Kew hold architectural records

dating back to the 18th century.

So Kieran hopes they might provide the answer.

Well, we've found this extraordinary book

in the National Archive which is a book of planning permissions for

schools, a huge number of schools all being built in the middle of

the 19th century, and in it we found the original planning permission

for Pitkennedy. It's really, really exciting, because what you get

is the kind of voices of the people who are commissioning the school.

I mean, it's really like going back to the moment

where Pitkennedy was first conceived and understanding the motivations.

But the most exciting thing for me about this document is that it says

that there's a fee for an architect, and indeed, right at the bottom of

this entry in the book is named an architect - John Ramsay, Architect

is the name signed here in his own hand, that confirms there was a designer

involved in Pitkennedy School, and somebody we can find out more about.

And with a name, Kieran can get online

and search for a list of works.

Finding the name John Ramsay has allowed me to go straight to the dictionary of Scottish architects,

and we find John Ramsay here, with a quite brief list of works,

most of which look fairly modest, to be honest.

We have repairs to farmhouses, we have re-windowing of a parish church.

He's a local architect, with fairly modest ambitions.

But you know, interestingly, he seems to have had a rather colourful life.

According to a memorandum, he lost all his money in a West Coast

herring fishery co-partnery and had to be laid aside in an asylum,

so clearly his business sense didn't match his design credentials.

To discover more about John Ramsay, Kieran's travelled the 500 miles

back to Scotland in search of any remaining examples of his work.

This is the last

and probably only really major work of the architect John Ramsay that we

found, and this is Lintrose House here in Angus, built in 1850.

In a way, it's the only clue that we can find to, you know,

the work of John Ramsay as an architect.

This building is completed just two years after Pitkennedy, contemporary

with it, clearly a period where he's enjoying some success.

Some of these decorative details we see here are quite interesting

to me cos they don't have any historic precedent - they're quite

eccentric pieces of design that he's obviously come up with himself.

Having seen these quirky design touches at Lintrose,

it's now possible to detect the hand of architect John Ramsay

in the design details of Pitkennedy.

But it does beg the question - who actually paid him

to design it in the first place?

Kate hopes that she might find the answer if she can discover

who originally owned the plot on which the school now stands.

In Scotland, the transfer of land has been recorded in the Sasine Register since 1617,

so at the National Archives of Scotland,

Kate hunts for a mention of Pitkennedy School.

This is one of the Sasine Registers, and what is important for us

is that here, in 1848, is a detail about the transfer, the gift,

of the land to build Pitkennedy School.

This entry tells us not only who was giving the land,

but it gives us a big insight into why they want a school,

and it's Patrick Chalmers of Auldbar and Pitkennedy,

who's giving the land, and he's very clear that he wants a school.

He says here, "I, Patrick Chalmers of Auldbar

"and Pitkennedy, considering that it's desirable that a school

"and schoolmaster's house should be erected on the southern part of

"the parish, have resolved to grant a conveyance to grounds as a site

"for that said school." So there we are, there's the beginning of our school.

It's a big moment.

Kate has discovered the benefactor of Charlotte and Helen's school.

Further investigation leads to a picture of the man himself.

Well, Patrick Chalmers was a pretty interesting man,

and this is his obituary from The Gentleman's Magazine that I found.

And what it says is he was at Oxford,

he left early to be a captain in the Army. By 1832, at the age of 30,

he stands as a Member of Parliament for the Liberals.

He devotes himself to country affairs

and spends a lot of time on agricultural labourers,

their dwellings, and most of all, on their education.

It says here that "I, Patrick Chalmers, be entitled to

"nominate the first teacher," so he wants to nominate the teacher,

there's lots here about what the teacher's going to teach, about the

rules, about the pupils, about the students, so it's not just like he's

building a building and then going to leave it alone, he actually cares

about the running of the school, he wants to make sure it's well run.

Through their research, Kieran and Kate have made two incredible

discoveries - that architect John Ramsay designed Pitkennedy,

while local philanthropist Patrick Chalmers paid for it.

Their discoveries give us a real sense of how this tiny rural

school came into existence.

But they also hint at the fact that Pitkennedy is

the start of a much bigger story.

For Kieran, the fascination is to explore

the transformation in school design that began with buildings like this.

But perhaps the biggest challenge of all will be to find any

account of the children who actually attended in the early days

of Pitkennedy School.

Crucial to the transformation of Pitkennedy from school into home

is the brand-new staircase linking the existing building to the

new first floor.

Despite never having done anything like it before,

Helen has taken it upon herself to design them.

I think this was probably about one of the first ones that I did,

before I had learnt to draw properly.

Um, and it was basically to show the different things that the

staircase was going to have to go through and round and in amongst.

Builder Alan has always known it'll be tricky,

but when staircase expert Bill pays a site visit,

it seems the stairs might not fit at all.

We're just taking definite sizes up here, not just guessing them downstairs.

The problem we've got downstairs at the moment is that the head height

between the top of her treads to the lowest point

of the ceiling is very tight, and we need two metres,

but at the moment we're about 100mm short.

On the drawing it works, so in theory it should work when we're here.

If you went by a drawing all the time you'd get it severely wrong.

There's only so much you can chop and change, you know,

there is a point where you go, no, we can't do any more.

The measurements are vital,

because the staircase will be prefabricated at Bill's workshop.

And because of the limited budget, Helen and Charlotte

only have one shot at getting it right.

Making the stair itself is the easy bit.

Actually fitting it in there can actually be the hard bit.

Until the hole for the stairs is cut, there is

no way of measuring if Helen's stairs will fit.

And now the Scottish weather has turned,

meaning Alan has to down tools for the day.

It's not good.

And the state of the leaky roof means that every time it rains,

Helen and Charlotte's house just gets wetter and wetter.

Built in 1847, Pitkennedy School was constructed at the very

start of the philanthropist-driven explosion of education in Scotland.

Before it, if rural children were lucky enough to go to school at all,

they would be taught in buildings which were little better than barns.

Pitkennedy's architect-designed building is already a massive

step forward from that, but Kieran is keen to find out

if school buildings kept on evolving, so he's off to see

another rural school built just a few years later than Pitkennedy.

Well, this school is built seven years after Pitkennedy, in 1855,

and you can see in that intervening period,

the aspiration, architecturally, seems to have risen.

You know, take the bell tower just as a piece,

it's clearly highly designed, and that's quite

distinct from Pitkennedy, which is much the more modest.

This building was designed by a man called James McLaren, who in 1855

was probably Dundee's foremost architect, certainly a leader

of the profession, and schools were seen as important enough to

occupy the finest architectural minds in this region at the time,

so educational architecture has become really important.

Between 1818 and 1855, there were 1,600 schools

built across Scotland, and this building is kind of the end

of that great boom of school building.

This is before any Act of Parliament,

this is bubbling up from churches and from philanthropists

who see the value of educating the rural poor, and actually, in

that period, we've seen a journey, a kind of trajectory of architectural

innovation that culminates in a building like this one.

The flourishes of the architecture here contrast with

the sobriety of Pitkennedy.

In just seven years, there's been a marked evolution in the design

of rural school buildings.

Back at Pitkennedy,

Charlotte and Helen have returned from a week's holiday.

It's immediately obvious that in that short time,

their restoration has taken a big step forward.

So we came back, and drove around the corner up there,

and suddenly there were roof trusses.

The skylights are brilliant. They just look like they've always been there. It's all coming to life.

This is the view from one of my bedroom windows.

It feels brilliant to be looking out of my window.

The view may be spectacular, but with Charlotte's house still unsold,

the financial picture for this build isn't anywhere near as clear.

People are just beginning to start asking for really quite large

sums, and the builder was saying this morning that he's going

to need to ask me for some money. He hasn't said how much yet.

Kate is back on her mission to explore what a school

like Pitkennedy meant to a community 150 years ago.

She's already found out it was established by philanthropist Patrick Chalmers,

but who was actually teaching the class?

At the National Archives of Scotland, Kate's hoping

that the 1862 school inspector's report will reveal the answer.

This report actually tells me quite a lot about the teacher, and

the teacher is Miss Helen Mitchell, who's 23 years old, and what's

interesting is, she's not qualified. She's been at teaching school

for a year, but she hasn't got a certificate, so they're saying that

she IS going to get a certificate, but she hasn't at the moment.

At the time, there was a real shortage of teachers. There weren't

enough teachers to go round, so a lot of teachers were unqualified

teachers who began at 13, 14, helping out with the local school.

At the time, teaching was one of the best ways

for someone from a humble background to get on in the world,

particularly for a woman, and it's clear that Helen Mitchell was

from a poor background and she wants to make something better of herself.

Investigating the history of Pitkennedy School gives us

a real insight into a time of massive social change.

Not only was our little school at the beginning of an explosion

in education, but also early attempts at social mobility `

something governments still strive for today.

Three months after the start of Charlotte

and Helen's project to transform Pitkennedy School into a home,

and the build has reached a crucial stage.

Today is a big important day, because today the roof will be

watertight, and the hole is getting cut for the stairs. Yay!

I'm expecting this to be quiet hard. Once we get a few Stihl saw cuts,

we'll get the big breaker up and start chipping out.

But the steel-reinforced concrete floor is a quarter of a metre thick.

So Alan will have to laboriously take it out in stages.

Breaking through the concrete floor represents a huge step forward

and the transformation of Pitkennedy School

into a place to live for Helen and Charlotte.

It could have been a lot harder, the concrete, so the client's happy.

This is a good day, this is a really good day,

I can see upstairs from inside.

Which is brilliant!

With the hole in the concrete roof now ready to be filled with

a brand-new staircase, Charlotte and Helen can't resist a trip

to Bill's workshop to see the ash it's being made from.

That's gorgeous. Really, really lovely. Yeah, it is, it's beautiful.

And you look at it against the light here, and it's just...

Yeah. It's fabulous.

Lovely to see that bit of wood go from rough to smooth,

and I think soon that's going to have all our stairs slotted into it.

And that's going to be part of the house. Forever.

So far, under builder Alan's expert guidance,

the restoration has progressed remarkably fast.

After only three months, the building is finally watertight.

The new roof is complete

and so the work that Alan has been paid to do is done.

Yesterday the scaffolding came down. It was great.

Very exciting, because it's the end of that phase of the building.

We have to actually get around to building some internal walls

instead of just talking about them.

This is a real turning point for Pitkennedy School.

For it to become a home, the bedrooms

and bathroom upstairs need to be finished.

And the only people who can make that happen are Charlotte

and Helen themselves.

It's a really tough ask for two novices, so a couple of weeks later,

I'm back at Pitkennedy to see how they're coping with the pressure.

Hello! Hello.

Hello, working women! Busy, busy! Charlotte, hello.

How are you? I'm fine. Lovely to see you.

Hello, Helen. Hi! Lovely to see you, you're so busy!

I know. This is hopefully our last bit of demolition

apart from a couple of ceilings. The roof looks great.

It's made such a difference. Has it?

I mean, there was one point when we had 52 buckets.

And you're still missing, I noticed, the staircase?

We have to get stairs because my knees will not cope with the ladder for much longer.

One thing I really need to find out is how things are going

with the budget, particularly with Charlotte's bungalow still unsold.

How crucial is it for you, financially, that, that...

The sale of the house? It's getting to be.

Uh-huh, it must be, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, just to get it finished.

I mean, there's like a heap of...like, this high,

of stuff that needs to be put into the spreadsheet, the finances,

because I haven't been near it for months, and I said at the beginning

of this that we have to have a day off every week.

And you just can't.

She's the one that's not been giving us a day off.

I know, but you can't when you've got builders and electricians

and plumbers. People are constantly making demands, aren't they?

We'll be back on Monday and we want you to have done THIS list.

Yeah. Is there a schedule of works?

Well, there was.

Yep, spent quite a long time working out a schedule of works,

and it went out the window on day one.

It is a relentless thing when you're doing it yourself.

Yes, it just takes over your life,

completely and utterly takes over your life.

But there's one great thing about it - I've lost over a stone

since we started!

I've lost half a stone.

Actually, I have to say, you both look really, really well on it.

The downstairs still looks like a building site,

so I can't wait to see

how Charlotte and Helen are getting on with their new upstairs rooms.

This is a good space. This is a really good space.

Don't sound so surprised. No, honestly, I had no idea.

And in here is a massive space, absolutely huge.

And what's going to happen up here?

Bedrooms. Bedrooms.

Two bedrooms? Yeah. That's Helen's bedroom wall.

Very good, so I'm in the corridor, there is a wall here? Yep. Yep.

And at the end of that there's another wall across and that's my bedroom.

The space that we come through, would that be your bathroom area?

There's a bathroom and another bedroom.

When I first came, I saw a schoolhouse which didn't look

much like a home, actually, but it is going to be a home quite soon, isn't it?

It's starting to feel more like a home.

Yeah, even just as you drive up here and see lights on.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There's nothing like coming up the road towards home

and seeing lights on at home. Yes.

I think the Waltons got it right.

We know that Pitkennedy School was funded by philanthropist Patrick Chalmers.

He, like so many of his peers,

had a desire to use his wealth to bring education to the poor

and so the late 19th century saw an explosion of philanthropically-funded education

right across Scotland.

Just 20 miles from Pitkennedy is the city of Dundee, and Kieran is there

to explore the design of the much grander urban schools of the time.

This is the Morgan Academy. It was a school originally for people

who couldn't afford to go to school any other way,

and it was left as a legacy by the great philanthropist, John Morgan.

When you look at the Morgan Academy now it does come across as

if it could be one of the poshest schools in Britain,

precisely because they were copying the Gothic of the medieval colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.

That reference in architecture has been brought to a school that is still for everybody.

It's still a comprehensive school today, and was built intentionally to educate the poor.

These Romantic Revival buildings were all about detail,

all about the kind of craft skill,

reviving some of that craft skill, and adding it in ladles.

So actually, up here you start to see some of the ironwork

and ironmongery in some of the carved stonework,

which you would never see from ground level.

Very much a statement about the importance of education.

The architectural flourishes at Morgan Academy are much grander

than those added by architect John Ramsay at Pitkennedy,

but together, they hint at a much wider architectural trend from the era.

Well, in the 19th century across Europe,

but especially in Great Britain, you have an amazing

explosion of Romantic styles, styles of architecture that look

backwards in time to try to revive something that may have been

lost by the sort of march forward of the Industrial Revolution.

In Scotland, the inflection of that Romantic style

is Scots Baronial revival, which looks back to a history

of Scottish castle building and fortified house building, and if you

needed any confirmation that Scots Baronial revival was, if you like,

the national style in this period, you find it in Balmoral Castle.

This was to be a deeply influential building for the rest of Scotland.

Houses, as well as schools and many other kinds of building were

being dressed up in a kind of Romantic style in order to

give them some roots in a way, give them a place in Scotland's

history, and I think in a way, Pitkennedy is part of that.

In terms of its design,

Pitkennedy School is part of a wider architectural movement

linking it with schools both large and small right across Scotland.

But that's only half the story.

What about the teaching that was going on inside those

architect-designed walls?

Kate has already discovered the name of Pitkennedy's first teacher,

but to really understand the school,

the crucial next step is to find out what was being taught there.

In 1872, the government in London sets up a Scottish education

department, and they publish a code which is essentially

the Scottish National Curriculum,

and it's very strict about what children should learn, especially

the three Rs. History and Geography don't get a look in till

standard four, and many children don't ever get to standard four.

What it's all about is reading and writing and notation

and numeration, and on the writing, it's essentially copying out.

This curriculum is all about standardisation.

It's all about the idea that every child's going to come out

with the same skill sets, the same capabilities, and the

inspectors are always going to be able to test for the same things,

apart from in one respect, as it says here,

"The work of girls will be judged more leniently than that of boys."

What Kate has discovered is that schools like Pitkennedy

witnessed the birth of a national curriculum.

For the first time, pupils like 101-year-old Susan were

learning the same things as every other school child in the country.

With winter fast approaching

and work in Pitkennedy nowhere near finished,

Charlotte and Helen have had to think about how to keep warm as they complete their restoration.

It's an auspicious moment because we're lighting the stove

to fire up the central heating for the first time. Yay!

Right, is everybody ready? Yes. Go for it.

This stove will be the primary source of both heating

and hot water for the whole house.

Yeah!

Look at that! Yay! We have hot running water! This is brilliant!

I can wash up!

It's a really welcome step forward for this project

because since builder Alan finished his part of the restoration,

Charlotte and Helen have mostly been working here alone.

But one thing they can't do themselves is install the vital staircase.

So securing an installation date is next on the agenda.

When can we have our staircase, Bill?

'Not this Tuesday coming but the following.'

Can you make it any before that? 'Er, we can do next Thursday.'

Next Thursday would be fine.

Yay!

With an installation date agreed,

Bill and his team can finally assemble the stairs in his workshop.

The basic stair is made out of American white ash.

While Bill has supplied the majority of wood for the stairs,

the newel posts are made from something even more special.

Helen's father supplied home-grown walnut, a couple of beams for that.

There wasn't enough to do all four newels, so what we've done is,

we've put a softwood core in it and then laminated all the way around.

The stairs are taking shape, so Charlotte and Helen will only

have to wait a few more days until they can be installed.

So far,

Kate has discovered a lot about the foundation of Pitkennedy School...

..and we have accounts of life in the classrooms from within living memory.

To delve further back, Kate's at the Angus Archives.

She's managed to unearth the very first logbook from Pitkennedy School,

dating back to 1871.

It offers a unique opportunity to actually hear the voices

from the classroom during the very first days of the school.

This logbook is a wonderful resource.

Every year there was a school inspector's report, pretty painful

for the teacher here, because the school is not really doing that well.

What we have here is, "Reading is poor throughout,

"in many cases deplorably so. Arithmetic is very inaccurate."

There's criticisms here for the management, of the desk,

of the layout - there aren't many good signs about the school at all.

It wasn't only what happened inside the school that affected standards.

For rural schools like Pitkennedy,

Kate has evidence that there were other factors at work.

In a rural area like Angus, the problem is that

some of the children were needed elsewhere, so on the 31st October,

it says "Owing to the potato lifting, only about one third

"of the pupils are present today." The following week the mistress

gave up and said, "The school has been closed all this week."

This is the minutes to the school management committee reports, and

it gives you everything here about the accounts and the organisation.

But what's really interesting to me is, it's about the students

who are exempted from ever coming again, and it's not just

the harvest, they always were needed at home to look after

the family. For example here, Rose Stewart, she's the daughter of

John Stewart, and it says,

"Father unable to work, and her service required

"for the remainder of school age," so she's needed at home to look

after her siblings, look after the family, and no more school for her.

This entry's from 1920, and this is, of course,

before the welfare state, there was no-one to look after you if you

fall ill other than your children, so they have to leave school.

Finally, the day that Charlotte

and Helen have been waiting for is here.

Their brand-new staircase has arrived.

Ah, that's gorgeous.

Charlotte and Helen have been waiting six months for this day.

How's about that! I'm almost getting emotional about it.

I'm hoping it fits!

How much more? That's it.

For a staircase like this, the margin of error is tiny,

and there's only so much adjustment that can be made on site to make it fit.

10mm off that check and it'll go back. But that's about it.

With some minor adjustments, the staircase slots in as planned

and for the first time in this building's history, not only

are there bedrooms to go to, but you can actually get to them with ease.

So much easier than a ladder!

Very beautiful.

You happy?

When it gets right up there with having a hole cut through

the concrete and... And when the roof was waterproof.

..it ties the whole thing together.

The stairs couldn't have come at a better time, because just

a few days later, Charlotte gets the news she's been praying for.

I've sold the house - yes!

It's been on the market for 18 months.

The sale of the bungalow may take the pressure off the finances, but it adds a whole new problem.

We have to move out on the 15th of January,

which is something less than four weeks.

Um, which gives us a deadline.

Once they've moved out of Charlotte's house,

their only option is to move into Pitkennedy, ready or not.

So the celebrations are put on hold as they embark on four weeks of hard graft.

To be able to move in, the very least

they will have to do is complete the two stud walls

dividing their bedrooms, and plasterboard the whole

of the upstairs, so their building skills are really being tested.

The night before the final move, things are just about habitable.

But the anticipation of filling an already full building with another

houseload of belongings has put the ladies in reflective mood.

You know, we thought, when we first bought this place,

that we would have stacks of space, and actually there isn't.

It feels as though there's nowhere to put anything.

I have no idea, apart from the stove,

where anything is going at all!

And finally, nine months after buying Pitkennedy,

Charlotte and Helen are moving in.

There's still a lot to do at Pitkennedy School, but after months

of chasing their tails to keep up with the other trades on-site,

moving in day brings a much-needed change of gear.

It's just a really nice thought that from now on we can do it

at our own pace, and not be constantly...

one screw ahead of somebody else.

Literally, in some cases.

Before we find out if Charlotte

and Helen have completed their transformation of Pitkennedy School,

Kate and Kieran are going to share their discoveries

about the very beginnings of the building that's now their home.

It's been a great journey,

but where we began was with a document that we found

in the National Archives in Kew, which relates directly to Pitkennedy School.

It gives us an amazing kind of description of the building.

This is 1847, and here we have the signature of John Ramsay, architect.

The idea that you would employ an architect tells you

something about the importance of that building.

He lost his money in a West Coast herring fishery co-partnery

and had to be laid aside in an asylum.

Oh, dear! Oh, poor chap! A little bit unfortunate. Yeah. Yeah.

Kieran's discovery about the name and fate of Pitkennedy's

architect is only half the story.

For Kate, it was the discovery of the philanthropist who

paid for the school which led to an understanding of its history.

"I, Patrick Chalmers, Esquire, grant a sale for the said school."

So there we are. To find the man who founded your school,

and thanks to whom your school exists... Yes, yeah.

Here he is, pretty handsome gentleman.

THEY LAUGH

It sort of brings it to life in a way that it didn't really come to life before.

Pitkennedy is almost THE story of education in Scotland. I mean,

it's a crucial part of education becoming universal, I think. Yes.

To me, it just shows what an exciting building it is.

And now we know and we've seen what at least one of the people

involved looks like, his picture can go up on the wall.

It's kind of paying tribute to his memory,

of what he was trying to achieve.

When Charlotte and Helen took on Pitkennedy School a year ago,

neglect had wreaked havoc.

Water was penetrating.

Mould and rot were rampant.

And the plaster was crumbling.

But now...

..it has been saved.

Hello. How are you?

Quite blustery up on the hill, isn't it?

The place has come a long way.

Yeah, we'll get there. We're pretty much there.

I know there's still little things to do out here,

but that was always going to be the case, wasn't it?

Absolutely. You can't build Rome in a day. Yeah, absolutely,

And you can't build Pitkennedy in a year or something. Yeah, yeah.

Still a work in progress, as you can see. Yeah.

But inside it's looking pretty good, I think. And it's warm.

Good, cos it's absolutely freezing out here!

The main attraction of the school was the space

and light offered by its two large classrooms.

But they were stuffed with school paraphernalia,

and nothing like the homely rooms they needed to be.

Now, one has been turned into a comfortable living room with

space for all their possessions.

Charlotte and Helen have also cleverly incorporated reminders

of the building's past, like the green paint and original cupboards.

Come into the living room.

Oh! And it is, it's a beautifully light, bright living room.

Yeah. Yes. It's no longer a classroom. No.

It's a haven. Yes.

These treasured items give the room a unique feel,

detached from mass-market minimalism.

In the other classroom...

..they've created a cosy kitchen-diner...

..with a host of eclectic touches.

It's like anything that you put your heart and soul into. Yeah.

It gives you a real grip on a place, if you like.

Yeah, there is a bond, isn't there, I think, when you've actually

really put, not blood, sweat and tears, but when you physically...

Oh, quite a lot of blood. Yeah!

A certain amount of sweat. Not many tears, actually.

Oh, good, I'm glad to hear it. No, no.

The rest of the existing building was in a bad way.

Mushrooms were sprouting and the plaster failing in the damp staffroom.

Now it's been transformed into a charming guest bedroom.

It's lovely, isn't it? It's really nice, yeah, I really like it.

Really cosy and warm. Yeah.

This building was built for the community and loved by the community.

How do you feel about the fact that you have saved it?

Good. I think, yeah, we feel good about saving it.

And people around here are very pleased,

and I think we've done it proud.

Yeah, I think you're right to be proud of it, Helen. Yeah.

Next door is the downstairs bathroom,

mixing modern-day convenience with Victorian style.

This is beautiful.

I love what you've done in here - it's quite eclectic,

you've got all sorts of lovely different things in here.

Yes, with the proper loo,

and then a few oddball touches like the weight and scales.

It's bonkers, but it kind of really works, doesn't it?

THEY LAUGH Yeah!

The biggest change of all is where once there was a functional

but charmless lobby.

Now the focus is a staircase designed by Helen.

The staircase, the magical staircase. Isn't it fabulous?

It's absolutely wonderful.

The moment we stopped having to climb a ladder to get upstairs...

Wonderful. Oh, such a relief.

I love these little bull-nosed steps and your lovely, soft, rounded

step at the bottom. Is that how you imagined they'd look? Yes, exactly.

It doesn't feel like a school any more, it feels like you live here. Yeah. Yeah.

The staircase leads to the most tangible

sign of the change from school to home.

The ugly single-storey extension now has a brand-new second floor.

There's still work to do, but already bedrooms

for Charlotte, Helen and visiting grandchildren are taking shape.

Charlotte's lovely room! Yeah.

Now there's space for family heirlooms.

Isn't that stunning? It's a fabulous piece.

I have a sneaking suspicion that my bedroom may still be

plasterboard and screws in five years' time.

Would it bother you, Charlotte? Not in the least.

The bright, airy upper floor overlooks the view that so

enchanted Helen and Charlotte when they first came to Pitkennedy.

Generally speaking, when people finish their restoration project,

they like it to look clear, but you want it to stay like this?

Yeah, absolutely. We like to be surrounded by our stuff,

and there's no point having it if you don't have it visible.

Yes, otherwise what's the point of collecting it?

Yeah, it's partly also that we're terrible squirrels.

Are you a right pair of squirrels? We are squirrels, yeah. We are.

Actually, in about ten years' time, we'll probably need a bigger house.

THEY LAUGH

When Pitkennedy School was first built on top of this blustery hill,

it was a beacon calling to generations of pupils,

offering them new opportunities where previously they'd had none.

Then, when finally the doors closed in 2005,

the building went into a rapid decline and the rot really set in,

and those voices of creativity and friendship were silenced.

That is, until Charlotte and Helen came along with their brave

new restoration, and they have given this place a whole new life -

a life of fun and friendship and eccentricity.

They plan to stay here for the rest of their lives, as friends,

continuing to work on this project.

And I think that deserves full marks.

'Next time on Restoration Home -

'a divine project...'

It's quite a bit leap from doing a little bit of decorating

together to buying a huge, almost derelict chapel.

As long as it don't fall down, I'll be happy.

'..with a historical pilgrimage.'

This document is absolutely vital to British history, to the history of religion.

'But can this chapel be born again?'

It does start off as a fairy-tale, doesn't it?

But I think the reality of doing it does take its toll.