Registered Charity Number 1075251
Barnes Pool and Austen Leigh Institute Hall
Austen Leigh and Baldwin’s Institute Hall
Austen Leigh and Baldwin’s Institute Hall: Edward Compton Austen Leigh (1839-1916), a Lower Master at Eton College, purchased Eton Court in 1909 and generously donated the site for the erection of a Parish Hall. The architect of the building was Edmond Lancelot Warre, and it was completed in 1911 and opened in 1912. The Trust is responsible for the administration of the Hall.
Its centenary was celebrated along with the Diamond Jubilee for Queen Elizabeth II and the Olympics in Eton Dorney in 2012 by landscaping the exterior of the building as part of the Town Council’s landscaping of Jubilee Square as a public urban open space.
Barnes Pool
Barnes Pool Baldwin’s Bridge straddles Barnes Pool, which is part owned by the Trust and part by Eton College. It is part of a watercourse that leaves the Thames at the west end of the Brocas meadow and returns after the Pool to the Thames below Romney weir. Originally a substantial watercourse that made Eton town an island, from which it gets its name (Island settlement), it is now a shallow stream. In the mid-1840s, the first 500m was culverted by John Roe (civil engineer), which opens into ‘The Brook’ in South Meadow, then travels on the south side of the college to Barnes Pool, returning to the Thames through a large culvert. Roe used Barnes Pool as a cistern to flush sewage to the Thames as part of Eton’s first drainage system.
The watercourse had all but dried up by the 2000s, and a community group restored the watercourse, returning flowing water in 2019 and providing a community waterside garden at the Pool and a vista west from on the Bridge.