There’s a specific moment when Eton College appears as you cross the Thames bridge from Windsor. Rising above the roofline, the chapel tower’s soft grey stone nearly blends in with the cloudy English sky. It doesn’t make a big announcement. The way only very old things can, it simply sits there, calm and unchanging.
Situated just across the River Thames from Windsor, Eton is a small town in Berkshire, England, where Eton College is situated. The address is simple: Eton, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 6DW, but a postcode cannot adequately convey the significance of the place. The drive to Windsor Castle takes about fifteen minutes. The 1,600-acre campus of the school stretches between the High Street and open playing fields that roll toward the river in what the college itself refers to as a semi-rural setting.
Eton the town and Eton the school are almost synonymous for the majority of visitors. Boys in their characteristic attire move between homes and classrooms on the High Street, which runs alongside college buildings, with the ease of commuters navigating a train station. Seeing an 800-year-old institution serving as the everyday backdrop of a working English town has a subtly unusual quality. Contrary to popular belief, the campus is not enclosed by gates. Some of it is just there, folded into the road.
In 1440, Henry VI established Kynge’s College of Our Ladye of Eton Besyde Windesore at this site. The geography was ingrained in the institution’s identity from the start by the name itself. His model was Winchester College, and the close proximity to Windsor, both then and now, was no accident. This logic has always included royal adjacency. The location of the school makes Prince George’s recent enrollment at Eton both symbolic and practical, carrying on a royal family tradition spanning generations. It takes about fifteen minutes by car to get to his family’s primary home.
If you slow down long enough to notice it, the campus’s semi-rural location in Berkshire rewards your attention. The School Yard, the College Chapel, and the cloisters are not tourist-oriented restorations or reconstructions. Some of the original structures, which date to the 1440s and 1480s, are still in use. The chapel’s interior wall paintings date back to that time. Irish artist Evie Hone created a stained glass window that was installed in 1952, and John Piper later finished the nave windows. It’s simple to forget which century you should be in when standing inside.
Eton is located in the borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, while Berkshire itself is located west of London. Although the county isn’t as well-known to foreign tourists as Oxfordshire or Surrey, this part of it has influenced more aspects of British public life than most locations ten times its size. With Windsor on one bank and Eton on the other, the River Thames serves as a natural border. Despite being only a few hundred meters across the water, this distance has always kept the school in its own unique space, connected to but not entirely engulfed by the larger world.
It’s possible that the school’s location reveals something about its personality that its history does not. Eton is situated in a small town that shields it from the bustle of a city, but it is close enough to London to benefit from it and close enough to the royal household to stay involved in national life. The 1,341 boys who are presently enrolled reside in a remarkably contained community. Playing fields along the Thames, a chapel, and twenty-five boarding houses are all accessible by foot. There’s a feeling that the location was selected to enable a specific type of education that relies as much on closeness and enclosure as on custom.
The practical solution is fairly straightforward for anyone attempting to visit. With stations at Windsor and Eton Riverside, Eton can be reached by train from London in less than an hour. The school is just a short stroll across the bridge from there. It is more difficult to describe what you find on the other side: a location that has been exactly where it is for almost 600 years and is still, in some way, very much in use.
