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The Mayo School of Industrial Art was set up to commemorate Lord Mayo, the British Viceroy to India, assassinated in 1872. A teacher of painting and sculpture Lockwood Kipling, working then in Bombay in a Parsi School, was appointed its first Principal parallel to his charge of the curator of the Lahore Museum.

The Museum and the School were conceived together. Funds were raised through a special levy throughout the Punjab province on the occasion of the Jubilee of the British Queen in 1887. The object was to provide an institution containing a museum, a library and a number of lecture rooms where instructional staff would teach indigenous crafts.

The Mayo School was intended to be a technical college in the fullness of time. Lockwood Kipling the curator Principal allowed the functions of the museum and the school to merge in a creative manner. Together with his more illustrious son, Rudyard Kipling, he planned and arranged the Museum in such a way that it reflected both the archaeological and the traditional crafts heritage of the Punjab.

The flooding of the Punjab market with British manufactures from Manchester drove the local industry out of business by the turn of the century. Popular taste was weaned from its cultural roots, which resulted directly in the decline of art and craft. Nearly 40,000 cotton workers and 900 weavers in Lahore were rendered jobless. Cotton printing being done in the city and once prized in such far-off places as Switzerland and Holland, was badly hit by the shoddy machine-made variants that came in from Manchester. Cottage industry in woolen and silk doth was virtually wiped out. The Mayo School became a haven for representative professionals from all the industries thus affected. European designs in building and furniture and the rise of the furniture firms brought bad times for the Punjabi carpenter reputed one of the cleverest in the world. The vogue received by photography and printing produced a great demand for lithographers and the school set up a process department for the production of line, half tone and colour blocks for illustrating purposes.

Lockwood Kipling turned his attention to the School more exclusively when it acquired its separate building in 1880 consisting of six rooms in the late Mughal style. Temporary additions were made to it in 1881 to house an exhibition of the Punjab Crafts. In 1891, these temporary structures were made permanent in accordance with a design prepared by the Principal. Now the school had proper workshops equipped with tools and machines. In 1902 four large machine workshops and photolithographic studio were already functioning. By 1911, nearly a lakh of rupees worth of machinery and tools were being operated in the school for such diverse crafts as jewellery, cotton-printing, book-binding, cabinet making, light-metal work, carpentry and blacksmithy. By 1915, the work done at the school was recognized all over India and also in England. The principal works executed by its craftsmen were thus located: Wood-carving, plaster-work and interior in Barnes Court, Simla; Government House, Lahore; Circuit House, designs for amphitheatre at the Delhi Durbar; execution of decorative work including carpets and shamianas of gold thread and repusse metal work and designs for the Law and Oriental Colleges, Lahore; design and decorative work in plaster for the new Railway Theatre, Lahore; a carved console table for Government House, Lahore; Punjab carving for the Billiard Room of Bagshot Park, England for the Duke of Connaught; an eight canon stall for the Lefroy Memorial in Lahore Cantonment’s Church.

The red-brick façade stands, fortress like, guarding the inner sanctum where the arts and crafts have been taught for more than a century.