A different kind of school architecture is starting to emerge. Different from the accepted norm that the ideal primary school should be single-storey, with classrooms arranged either side of a broad corridor, with a big hall sticking up somewhere, and the whole thing surrounded by Tarmacked playgrounds the way a supermarket is surrounded by carparks. So what do we make of the new £6m Hampden Gurney School, which looks like a glassy beehive, stacks both pupils and playgrounds high in the air, and puts its hall down in the basement?

Don’t be fooled by the bucolic-sounding name. Hampden Gurney is no sleepy little village, but an inner-city London church school near Marble Arch that takes its Trollopian name from the 19th century High Anglican clergyman who founded it. It is very close to the roar of traffic on Edgware Road, and surrounded by dense apartment blocks. It sits on a corner of a city block that is being redeveloped with more flats. The flats are paying for the school, which looks like it has got itself a good deal: for this is anything but cut-price architecture. It has just won one of this year’s crop of RIBA architecture awards.