I went last weekend to the inaugural Buckingham History Festival. It was held by the University of Buckingham, under the aegis of its vice-chancellor, Sir Anthony Seldon, and Professor John Adamson, director of the Humanities Research Institute, across its campus in the town. How unlike most modern universities this exemplary institution looks.
Rather than the usual assembly of third-rate modernist architecture, devoid of style, beauty or coherence, smashed together like the Lego creation of a fevered toddler, Buckingham mixes restored mills and houses with modern buildings, designed sensitively so that the whole appears to have developed organically. It typifies the university’s approach to study and tuition. Take the best of accumulated knowledge and the best of current scholarship, allow the former to inform the latter without being ossified or hidebound, and set students to thinking for themselves from first principles under the guidance of scholars at the top of their fields.
