Overview

The Story of White Hall Centre White Hall Centre for Open Country Pursuits, near Buxton in Derbyshire, was set up in 1950 by Jack Longland, Derbyshire's director of education. The Story of White Hall Centre describes White Hall's origins and its sixty-seven years in existence. Written references to the setting-up of White Hall show that one of the main purposes of the centre, at a local level, was straightforward and was openly and repeatedly stated: to introduce young people of Derbyshire to what Peter Mosedale, the centre's first warden, called the 'hill and water sports'. The written sources also reveal a more ambitious intention, in the mind of Jack Longland, which was to demonstrate and promote a widening of physical education nationally. They show that he frequently spoke of the need to extend physical education beyond the playing fields and that he set out deliberately to do exactly that. Longland pursued his vision boldly in the face of local and national criticism. Taking school pupils on adventurous outdoor pursuits was not a new idea, but the scale of the Derbyshire development - a residential centre running all year round and open to young people from across the county - was unprecedented. By 1970, Longland had observed 'an astonishing drift of the whole range of subjects which we call physical education towards outdoor pursuits, towards mountains and moors and rivers, lakes and the sea'. In successfully achieving Longland's local aims and in significantly influencing national developments, White Hall Centre helped to widen the meaning of education, and particularly of physical education.

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9780473425272

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Extract from a review by Tim Jepson in The Professional Mountaineer, no. 22 (Summer 2018), p. 40. The Story of White Hall Centre is long, 700+ pages long, dealing comprehensively with complex issues in forensic detail ... Indeed, I could not identify one event of relevance to outdoor education in Britain that had been omitted or skimmed over as part of the White Hall story ... It is almost certainly the case that had White Hall never existed, Outdoor Education in the UK would still have developed elsewhere on our islands, reaching similar outcomes by a parallel path. But as The Story of White Hall Centre clearly testifies, it was the White Hall Centre which pioneered the child-centred approach to outdoor education which has now served schools and pupils so well for nearly seventy years. This is a story which needed to be written down, not just for its own sake, but to celebrate all those centres, many now closed, and all those teachers who have devoted time, energy and enthusiasm to giving young people opportunities to experience living adventurously in natural environments.

Author Information

While a teenager in Merseyside in the early 1960s, Pete McDonald took up hillwalking and rock climbing. In 1968 he worked as a temporary instructor at a residential centre in the Lake District. This opening led in 1976 to a permanent job as an instructor at White Hall Centre, where he spent sixteen years. In 1992 he emigrated to New Zealand, where he divided his time into roughly equal portions of fatherhood, teaching, writing and cycling.

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