L is for Lampeter

St David's University College flag

Lampeter, a small town hidden a west Wales valley, is where I went to university, and is peopled with a mixture of farmers, local people who are slightly chavvy (and dare I say it, sometimes suffering from living in an isolated community where too many cousins have married each other!) but lacking the harsh edge of their big city look alikes, hippies, drifters, oddballs, refugees from the badlands of (post) industrial south Wales come to start businesses or retire and an eclectic selection of lecturers and students. These photos are all taken at during my graduation in July 2007, on a rather changeable summer day!

inside the Old Building Quad

I had a wonderful three years here studying English. Unusually for an undergraduate course, I was actually able to get to know my lecturers. Possibly they may have regretted this when they received yet another email from my wanting to discuss some obscure point of English literature!

The Old Building

And despite being the smallest public university in the UK, and I think Europe, there was a remarkable mixture of students, from 18 year olds to retirees, people of all social backgrounds and interesting variety of overseas students. Even more remarkably, espcially when compared to the experience of my friends at university where social groups tended to stratify around class and age, everybody mixed in together. I met so many different types of people from all over the world, which having lived my whole life in a rather narrow minded town, really broadened my horizons.

statue in above the cloisters of the Old Building, possibly of St David?

Lampeter is the third oldest university in England and Wales, after Oxford and Cambridge, and was founded in 1822. It's interest in educating people who are capable of benefitting from a university education, rather than playing the league table system, and its small size, means that there is a distinct possibility that it might not make it to it's 200 year anniversary, as this makes in an unfashionable anachronism in an age when universities in the UK seem to be becoming more and more like factory production lines.

clouds over campus and town

This is a remarkably beautiful place, so expect more photos of it from my archives when I get back to the UK!

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