Just past noon on a windy March day in 1930, Victoria School caught fire and burned to the ground. No one was hurt; students had left the school for lunch break.

An hour earlier or later and the fire could have been tragic. By five o'clock this historic landmark was a smouldering ruin. 

Out of the ashes, using labour supplied by the Winnipeg Unemployment Relief Department, rose the present-day school. Eight months after the blaze the $181,595 school opened with enough space to accommodate students from both Victoria and Albert schools.

This is how our school looks today        Old patrol picture

The block where Victoria-Albert School stands has been used for education longer than any other site in the city.

Winnipeg's first permanent school, Central #1, was built there in 1877, and five years later, Central #2 was constructed alongside. The schools were renamed in 1898 to honour Queen Victoria and her husband. After the fire, the old Albert School became a textbook warehouse until it was demolished in 1951.

Victoria-Albert features some unusual exterior brickwork. Every fifth row of bricks are headers, not stretchers, in a pattern called American bond. The entry pavilion and adjacent walls use a technique called diapering where diamond shapes are created using black brick headers. The design is framed with Tyndall Stone corners. The arched limestone entranceway is impressive with its brackets, quoins and keystone.

The two-story, 24-classroom school has classrooms along two central hallways, allowing its massive number of windows to provide adequate light to each room. The interior has been renovated but the arched hallway ceilings, alcove classroom entries, half-paned wooden doors and hardwood floors remain. A large addition, including a new gym, was built in 1984.

Samuel Hooper, Manitoba's first Provincial Architect, designed two significant historical buildings, which bracket Victoria-Albert--Normal School (1906) to the west and the Carnegie Library (1905) on the east. This allowed students to readily access the library, and Normal School student teachers to use Victoria-Albert as a test school for new ideas in curriculum and textbooks.

The inner-city neighbourhood around the school has long been a landing site for new immigrants. Bounded by Main, Sherbrook, Notre Dame and the CPR tracks, the area was previously known as the Dagmar district. Beginning with Europeans in the 1870's, the neighbourhood has since integrated thousands of new Canadians from six continents.

Starting in the early 1930's, Victoria-Albert was among the first schools in Winnipeg to offer a dental clinic to students and families. In the 1940's, the school offered photography classes with a darkroom under the stairs. By 1948, every classroom had a radio and the school provided guidance counselling and sex education.

Today, Victoria-Albert School offers nursery to Grade 6 education to about 415 students.

article by Reid Dickie taken from the Winnipeg Free Press Jan. 29, 2005