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The school began in 1627 when the first 8 'poore boyes' were selected. But the school choses to date its founding from the drawing up of Edward Latymer's will in 1624.

The Latymerian January 2015 has "The first eight boys were selected in July 1627 and taught first by James Clewett in a room over the porch of All Saints' Church Fulham {the current church has this war memorial}, numbers increased constantly. They moved to a school next to St Paul's Church in Hammersmith {on the west side of the gyratory} in 1756 and were joined by girls in the Female Charity School in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. In 1863 the Governors opened the new Foundation School in Hammersmith Road, and then, in response to the developing educational needs of London, they opened the Upper School {where this plaque is} in January 1895."

This 1895 map shows a 'School - Girls' just north of St Paul's Church, about where the westbound carriageway of  Hammersmith Bridge Road now joins the gyratory. That same map shows 'Lower School (Latymer Foundation) Boys' set back from Hammersmith Road, opposite Wolverton Gardens. That entire area was redeveloped into massive blocks of offices by the 1960s.

We find this boundary wall very odd, with the parade of large grilled arched openings. The earliest image we can find is a 1977 photo.  We want to know: has it always been like this?  Is this how it was designed? And if not, what happened that this was the result? But then we remembered that the Royal Courts of Justice has a quite similar boundary wall on Strand. The RCJ Listing entry describes this as a 'screen wall' and dates the whole building to 1874-83. So perhaps the Laytmer architect liked the idea and copied it 20-odd years later.