College anniversaries

Happy anniversary!

In the year of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, life in our colleges has bounced back even stronger than ever after the lifting of restrictions. Annual college events returned at the end of Michaelmas Term and were a great opportunity for our college communities to come together and celebrate.

Within the last year, there have been a number of special anniversaries within our colleges community. Some of the younger colleges have been celebrating - Josephine Butler College marked 15 years and John Snow and Stephenson Colleges recently celebrated their 20-year anniversaries with a joint formal in the Mount Oswald Hub Hall. Three of the colleges are reaching milestone anniversaries and are choosing to mark the occasions in very different ways. Collingwood College is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a series of events, starting with a launch dinner in London on September 10, then a programme of reunion dinners from October this year to April 2023. St Aidan’s College are currently developing a plan to celebrate their 75th anniversary with events suggested by their alumni – so watch this space! Hatfield College is choosing to celebrate its history through ‘Lions on the Bailey’, a large-scale immersive performance specially commissioned to mark the 175th anniversary of its founding in 1846 by David Melville. Keen that this historic anniversary be celebrated on stage, Hatfield Master Ann MacLarnon invited established playwright and writer Mike Elliston to spend academic year 2021-22 in residence as a Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing. This has given him the opportunity to research both the wider university and Hatfield College history, consulting staff, students and alumni, whilst experiencing Hatfield’s diverse culture and student activity embodied in its ethos #AllOneHatfied. In collaboration with a team of students, he has co-written and curated a unique event featuring the comedy drama ‘Lions on the Bailey’ and three mini dramas set in the college Chapel, The Birley Room and the SCR Dining Room, dressed as it originally was, as an 18th Century Inn, The Red Lion. The main event has been designed to be performed in the shadow of the Cathedral on the college tennis court, transformed into an outdoor theatre space and auditorium. Alongside original, student-created music and dance, an anthology of recorded oral reminiscences has been created from across the generations, drawn from both alumni and staff.