They wanted Holland Park academy to look unlike a school. They got that right

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/05/holland-park-academy-unlike-school

Version 0 of 1.

I open the Guardian and gaze on some cutting-edge whizzo architecture. A whopping great monolith of glass and steel and bronze and soaring atriums. My goodness, it's frightful. A corporate nightmare, hatched by world-class architects for a mere £80m. What can it be? This glittering folly? London's third airport? Another Titanic? Not quite. It is "a glistening cruise-liner of state school".

It is also, my old school: Holland Park comprehensive in west London, where I taught for nearly 30 years, and from where I was sacked in the purge of 2004-5, along with 100 other wrong 'uns: lefties, loonies, dotards and NUT members. I left the place, blaspheming and blubbing and banned forever.

That old school will close on 3 November to be born again in this "aspirational monument" on 19 November. Holland Park academy – the new "socialist Eton". Dear me. The place has always attracted lazy cliches: we've always been called "the Eton of comprehensives" or "the alma mater of the leftwing aristocracy" – full of Benns and Toynbees. Taught some myself.

The tabloids were always keen on us: full of tales of spliff-ridden playgrounds or grammatically challenged teenagers bunking off to form vice rings or frolicking on ecstasy in the sixth-form pond. Fabulous stuff. We leftwing loonies were terrifically busy promoting deviance, drugs, revolution, homosexuality, illiteracy, Rastafari, Marxist Leninism and grocer's plurals. It quite wore us out.

Now articles about the school tell us that "creative anarchy has been replaced by uniform and discipline". Ah, the old "turned around" narrative. Creative anarchy? The school was a proper community comprehensive, reflecting the rich mix of the old Notting Hill. Yes, it was probably naive, daft, and on the wilder shores of pedagogy, but it was always brave, thrilling and fiercely intellectual. And it had real soul. A colossal energy. Our English departments were full of passionate Leavisites and Empsonians, for whom literature was as serious as your life. We may have been socialist clots, but the place buzzed with creativity with visits from Michael Rosen, Benjamin Zephaniah, Wendy Cope, Ted Hughes, Nelson Mandela and the Clash. Headteacher Derek Rushworth was a rare visionary, whose assemblies could be about Jean Paul Sartre or Paul Robeson or JS Bach, whose staff meetings could address RD Laing or Basil Bernstein or Noam Chomsky. Can you imagine that today? Lord Sugar seems to be the modern guru.

So … shall I risk taking a return visit? Am I still gagged? Still banned? Will there be bouncers and bloodhounds and CCTV? Why not try, I thought. I sneak down the side streets like a cold war spy to the old gates. Streetlight falls across the ivy and lattice windows of an old building. Thorpe Lodge. It seems unchanged. I taught fabulous sixth forms there – Flannery O'Connor, Bleak House, King Lear, Hunter Thompson, Alice Walker and those slim Faber poets like Thom Gunn. It's now a Business Studies Emporium.

Onwards! Ssssh … I sneak in. No sirens or bloodhounds or flashlights. I pass shivering trees in the old sixth-form gardens. I put the collar up and the hat down and turn a corner – and suddenly, wallop! It's there. A great, glittering monolith, full of glass and steel and bronze fin-wing things. A ghastly Pleasure Dome – like something related to the Shard.

"We didn't want it to look like a school", says an associate head. Well, they got that right. It resembles Manhattan ad agency. An open-plan hell. With miles of glass – "to encourage passive supervision and transparency". Or Big Brother surveillance? There are, says the head, "no hidden areas ... no dark places". Just clinical, migraine-inducing light.

But don't pupils need to hide? Doesn't a bit of darkness nourish privacy, creativity, ambiguity, contemplation and the shades of academe? They'll all get rather blasted here. We knew we were in deep trouble, when the new regime stuck a Sylvia Plath line on a wall: "I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions". Silver and exact. This is about psychosis. Empathy loss. Happy, shiny pupils, caught in this palace of light. Silver and exact.

"A socialist Eton"? My bum. I resist blubbing and scarper into darkness through those old school gates – like I never happened.