Milton Mount College

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Milton Mount College was a girls’ boarding school near Gravesend, Kent, England. It was founded in 1871 by Rev. William Guest of the Princes Street Congregational Church and opened to pupils in 1873. The first headmistress, Selina Hadland, was a pioneer of girls’ education, and the school was among the early UK schools to include domestic science in its curriculum.

The original building stood on the south side of Windmill Hill at Parrock Road and Echo Square. It was designed in Victorian Gothic style by E. C. Robins and formed an “E” shape. After the start of World War I, air raids in 1915 forced the school to move first to Cirencester, Gloucestershire, and then to Worth Park near Crawley, West Sussex, where it stayed after the war.

Tilgate House and Worth Park were demolished in the 1950s. In the 1960s, Milton Mount College merged with Bournemouth Collegiate School to become Wentworth College. The original Milton Mount building was used for various purposes during and after the war, including as a munitions workers’ hostel, a hospital, and later as an orphan school run by the Roman Catholic Church after 1921. It was evacuated to Ugbrooke Park, Devon, in 1940 and returned in 1945. The building was finally closed in 1951 and demolished in 1972 to make way for housing. A Milton Mount Primary School in Crawley opened in 1972.