Hackney Downs School opened in 1876 as The Grocers' Company's School, founded by the Worshipful Company of Grocers. Transferred to the London County Council and renamed Hackney Downs School in 1906, it operated for 119 years before the government ordered it to close in December 1995.

For much of its life it was a school of genuine distinction. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as Jewish families from Eastern Europe settled in Hackney in large numbers, the school's catchment shifted and its character with it. The school became known informally as the Jewish Eton — a grammar school whose alumni included the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, the painter Leon Kossoff, and the playwright and actor Steven Berkoff. The actor Michael Caine attended briefly in 1944 and 1945, during the school's wartime evacuation to King's Lynn.

The school began taking comprehensive intakes from 1969, completing the transition by September 1974. The borough it sat in was changing rapidly. Through the 1980s, Hackney became one of the most deprived local authorities in England — high unemployment, rising poverty, a population that was younger, more transient, and more diverse than at any point in the school's history. By the time of its closure, over seventy per cent of the boys spoke English as a second language, half came from households with no one in employment, and half had reading ages three years below average.

In 1994, an Ofsted inspection placed the school under special measures. The following year, a government-appointed body, the North East London Education Association, took control. Described in the press as a hit squad, it concluded the school was not viable on financial, educational, or management grounds. Enrolment had fallen to around 200 pupils in a building designed for 700. The Association's 1995 report put the school's deficit at £292,000 and estimated the repairs bill for basic safety work alone at £2 million. On 21 December 1995, the school closed.

The closure was contested. The book Hackney Downs: The School That Dared to Fight, published in 1999 by Maureen O'Connor, Sally Tomlinson, Elizabeth Hales and Jeff Davies, argued that the school had been singled out and that its results were not significantly worse than those of comparable inner-city schools facing comparable pressures. The debate it sparked has not entirely settled. In 2024, Tim Dowley published The Worst School in England: The Rise and Fall of Hackney Downs, drawing on institutional records to tell the school's story across its full 119 years.

The building stood empty for six years.