Mathias Springham of London's Merchant Taylors' Company founded the Free Grammar School in 1617, three years before the city walls were complete. For nearly two centuries the school sat at Society Street, inside those famous walls, teaching boys Latin while siege and rebellion swirled outside. The Honourable The Irish Society and the Church of Ireland's Bishop of Derry feuded for generations over who had the right to appoint a headmaster - a dispute only resolved by an Act of Parliament in the early nineteenth century. In 1814 the school moved to a Georgian building on the Strand, designed by John Bowden, the same Dublin architect responsible for St Stephen's 'Pepper Canister Church'. A boarder named George Fletcher Moore proposed the school be re-christened 'Foyle College', and the assembled boys carried the motion with what one account calls 'repeated acclamations'. Moore himself would later sail to Western Australia and become one of the colony's most prominent settlers - the school's first known imperial export.

Walk through Foyle College and you find a house called Lawrence, its members wearing blue stripes on their ties. The name belongs to the Lawrence brothers, two of the most extraordinary careers in British imperial history, both shaped by the same Derry classroom. Henry Lawrence died during the siege of Lucknow in 1857, struck by a shell while defending the Residency during the Indian Rebellion. His brother John lived to govern. As Viceroy of India from 1864 to 1869, he ruled over hundreds of millions of people from Calcutta. The brothers had grown up in the modest provincial school by the river - then walked into roles that shaped a subcontinent. Other notable pupils followed: James Gwyn became a Union Army general in the American Civil War; songwriter Percy French wrote 'Are Ye Right There, Michael?'; politician Ivan Cooper helped found the SDLP and led the civil-rights march that became Bloody Sunday. The school's most recent crop includes Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and actress Amanda Burton.

For most of its life, Foyle was a school for boys. Across town, a different story was unfolding. The Ladies' Collegiate School, founded in 1877 by the Misses McKillip, was part of a pioneering Irish movement for women's higher education. It became Victoria High School, then merged in 1922 with Miss Kerr's St. Lurach's College to form Londonderry High School, which moved into Duncreggan House in 1928. For most of the twentieth century the two schools coexisted: Foyle for boys, Londonderry High for girls, each with its own traditions and old-pupil associations. In 1976 the Foyle and Londonderry College Act merged them into the first co-educational grammar school in Derry. In 2011 the governors quietly rebranded the school back to just 'Foyle College', a decision that drew sharp objections from Londonderry High School Old Girls who felt their school had been written out. The legal name remains Foyle and Londonderry College - a small bureaucratic compromise carrying the weight of two histories.

In 2017 the school moved again, this time to a £24 million single campus on the Limavady Road. The site has its own ghosts: it was once a United States Naval Communications Station, part of the Cold War North Atlantic listening network. Now it is the first place in fifty years where every Foyle pupil sits on the same patch of ground. The school remains academically selective, requiring the AQE Common Entrance exam, and competes hard in rugby, hockey, and cricket - winning the Ulster Schools Bowl twice in three seasons in the mid-2000s. The house names tell the school's story in miniature: Lawrence for the Viceroy of India, Springham for the London merchant who founded it, Duncreggan for the girls' school, Northlands for the boys'. Four houses, four centuries, one institution still teaching the children of Derry.