Merchant Taylors' School is one of the great institutions of English education, founded in 1561 by Sir Thomas White and members of the Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors in a manor house in the City of London. Its first Head Master, Richard Mulcaster, was a pioneering educationalist who taught the poet Edmund Spenser among his earliest pupils, and the school went on to be counted among the nine public schools examined by the Clarendon Commission of the 1860s. After more than three centuries in the City, first at Suffolk Lane and then at Charterhouse Square, the school made its defining move in 1933 to Sandy Lodge, a 285-acre estate near Northwood on the Hertfordshire-Middlesex border, where it remains today.
MTS is a boys' day school for ages 11 to 18, with around 1,100 pupils and entry by examination at 11 and 16. The 2015 merger with Northwood Prep created an all-through foundation from age 3, and the school retains a close relationship with its sister school, St Helen's Northwood. Pupils belong to one of eight houses - Spenser, Raphael, Hilles, Walter, Mulcaster, White, Andrewes and The Manor of the Rose - and the school's traditions run deep, from its own form-naming system and vocabulary to a prefect body still divided into "the Table" and "the Bench" as it was in the 1690s. The motto, Concordia parvae res crescunt, translates as small things grow in harmony. Former pupils are known as Old Merchant Taylors, or OMTs.
The roll of OMTs is remarkable in its range: Lancelot Andrewes, who oversaw the translation of the King James Bible; Robert Clive; John Walter, founder of The Times; Nobel laureate John Sulston; Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan; Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Stirrup; and in the arts, Boris Karloff, Riz Ahmed and Michael McIntyre.
Sport is central to the Sandy Lodge experience, and the grounds are among the finest of any school in the country. The cricket ground has hosted first-class matches for Middlesex since 2012 and served as a training base for both the Australian and Indian Test sides, with the Julian Hill Cricket Centre opening in 2024. Rugby carries an equally strong pedigree. Old Merchant Taylors' FC has produced a long line of internationals, headed by Ronald Cove-Smith, who captained England and led the 1924 British Lions tour to South Africa, and John Raphael, the England and Surrey all-rounder who was capped in both rugby and cricket and whose name the school gave to one of its houses in 2021. Facilities include an indoor swimming pool, sports hall and extensive playing fields spread across the parkland estate.