140 Years of Selwyn Anniversary Appeal - Spring 2022

ANNIVERSARY APPEAL 140 years

1882–2022

Two new projects to help celebrate 140 years of successful growth

Selwyn College Cambridge

YEARS OF PROGRESS

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

In 2022 Selwyn will celebrate 140 years since its foundation as a place where students could receive an ‘economical education’. In 1880, the six acre site was still a slab of traditional fenland farmland of water meadows, ditches and hedgerows, much of it in the shadow of mighty elm trees. By 1882 the first buildings of Old Court had been constructed and the college welcomed its first cohort of 28 undergraduates. In 2022 total student numbers are 638 illustrating how the college has put down roots and grown steadily in line with our changing society and a widening of participation in higher education. With each stage of growth, new buildings have been acquired or built and philanthropy has been responsible for most of these, from the iconic late Victorian buildings of Old Court through to the creation of Cripps Court in the 1960s and the completion of Ann’s Court in 2021.

2022 will see the completion of two more important capital projects for which we are seeking your help. The first is the refurbishment of the Old Library, which will further enhance Selwyn’s teaching, learning and archival facilities. The second is the ‘Three Hostels Project’ – an ambitious low-carbon housing programme, providing students with high quality, environmentally responsible accommodation that responds to the 21st century challenges of our rapidly changing climate.

In 2022 Selwyn will celebrate 140 years since its foundation as a place where students could receive an ‘economical education’.

D O N AT E T O S E LW Y N – P L A N T A T R E E A partnership with the Woodland Trust Selwyn is blessed with beautiful gardens and a wonderful collection of trees. The world needs more trees, so as part of our 140th anniversary, we’re working in partnership with the Woodland Trust to help create a new forest on the Smithills Estate, near Bolton, in Lancashire. During 2022, for every donation of £250, we will plant a tree with the aim of creating one or more Selwyn acres of native woodland to help mitigate emissions and which is sustainable and rich in biodiversity. Each planted acre comprises 750 individual trees and we’ll create a special, permanent record at the college and online where the names of donors will be recorded including details on how to find and visit the Smithills Estate.

Thus a gift to Selwyn’s anniversary appeal will not only help the college to complete these important refurbishment projects but you will also be doing something positive to help the environment. Further details about the Smithills Estate project can be found here www.woodlandtrust.org. uk/visiting-woods/woods/smithills-estate.

31 Grange Road – one of the three hostels that will be transformed by a low carbon refurbishment

An 1880s view of Selwyn still surrounded by famland

THE THREE HOSTELS PROJECT The Three Hostels Project is a programme to refurbish three traditional hostels on Grange Road and Selwyn Gardens, retrofitted to demanding new environmental standards that will reduce the carbon footprint of the site by 60%.

The Three Hostels Project is almost like a new court comprising three Victorian houses (29 and 31 Grange Road and 1 Selwyn Gardens) but configured around large and adjoining communal gardens. We hope the project will provide an exemplar of how a carefully planned retrofit can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of an older building, without resorting to wasteful demolition and rebuild.

According to the Carbon Trust, around a quarter of the UK’s current carbon emissions comes from our homes and the direct use of fossil fuels that provide heat and light. The challenge is how to retrofit the vast majority of our housing stock so that these buildings are more energy efficient and less reliant

on fossil fuels. At the same time, we will also need to anticipate the likely effects of climate change over the coming decades, including higher summer temperatures.

To achieve this with these three properties, we need to create high levels of insulation and airtightness of walls, windows and roofs, minimising heat loss and driving down energy consumption throughout much of the year.

The opportunities offered by treating all three houses as a single entity includes the provision of ground source heating that can be shared equally. This works particularly well with underfloor heating,

which will be installed as part of the project, with each room having its own thermostat.

We’ll also be looking to install waste water heat recovery systems on showers, reducing overall hot water energy demand. The Selwyn Gardens property will also have a fully accessible room on the ground floor, with the kitchen and communal areas redesigned to meet the requirements of all users.

Cost: £4m Completion: August 2022

WINTER

SUMMER

HEAT PUMP

HEAT PUMP

GROUND HEAT EXCHANGER

HEAT COLD

1 Selwyn Gardens, purchased in 2021 to help provide additional graduate housing

Ground source heating system, providing low-cost, low-carbon heat and hot water for decades to come

THE OLD LIBRARY The refurbishment and repurposing of Selwyn’s original 1930s library for teaching, supervision and archive purposes. so that the whole building becomes much more energy efficient and meets a range of contemporary needs for the college, students, staff and alumni.

The ground floor will become a suite of five flexible teaching and supervision spaces. One of these will be a dedicated anatomical teaching room for medic and vet students, which will include an Anatomage Table – a 3D virtual dissection table for anatomy education – that allows users to visualise anatomy as they would on a human or animal cadaver.

The Old Library

Originally funded by an alumni appeal, the Old Library sits under the canopy of Selwyn’s last surviving elm tree and was completed in 1930 as a memorial to alumni and staff who died in the First World War. Our plans are to refurbish the library

In the long vacation, these rooms will significantly complement Selwyn’s excellent conference facilities, helping to provide additional income for the college.

The ground floor 1980s extension will provide a new home for the college archives and rare books collection, as well as providing display and research

space, allowing greater use and appreciation of the college’s archival collection.

The upper floor will retain some of the fixtures and furniture of the original library, acknowledging the important heritage of this much loved building.

We’ll create an alumni hub comprising a new office for the alumni relations and development team, which will be accessed via an informal alumni and friends’ parlour. This will be a place where you will be welcome to drop in, meet up with friends, perhaps prior to attending college events, browse the collection of alumni books and publications and of course, chat to the friendly alumni relations team.

Cost: £1.4m Completion: April 2022

Left to right: Medic and vet students will benefit from the latest digital teaching aids; Supervisions are at the heart of Cambridge teaching; Selwyn’s historic archives will become much more accessible

HOW YOU CAN HELP We hope that many of our alumni and friends will be able to contribute to this anniversary appeal.

In return, we want to acknowledge your help and we’ll do this in various ways. As well as helping to create the Selwyn woodland, there will be various ‘naming’ opportunities in return for specific donations; from the naming of a whole hostel to individual student rooms, to archival and rare books shelving. In these and other ways, future generations of Selwyn students will be aware that the facilities they

Support at this time for either of our new projects would be especially helpful and greatly appreciated – at any level.

use and enjoy owe their existence to the generosity and goodwill of today’s alumni and friends.

Financially, the health crisis has inevitably been challenging for the college, which has had to cope with a major loss of income from student rents and a collapse of conference business for two years.

But this is what we held reserves for – and we’ve weathered the storm. However, support at this time for either of our new projects would be especially helpful and greatly appreciated – at any level. Please see the enclosed donation form for more information about how you can help. You can also find a short video about these projects here www.selwynalumni. com/three-hostels-project. Or please feel free to call us on 01223 763937 if there is any aspect of these projects that you would like to discuss.

There are many ways in which we are able to acknowledge your support. Future generations of Selwyn students will be reminded of the generosity and goodwill of today’s alumni and friends.

A MESSAGE FROM THE MASTER It is impossible to live where I do, at the Master’s Lodge in the heart of the college, and not be conscious every day of Selwyn’s history. I face out onto Old Court and the building which houses A and B staircase – the first construction on this site before the opening of the college in 1882. The Lodge followed in 1883; then the chapel in 1895; and the building of the hall began in 1909. The mission of the college had always been clear: to offer the best possible education to people from all backgrounds, including those who might otherwise not be able to afford to study in Cambridge. And to do that, we have relied on philanthropy from the very start – and 140 years on it is more true than ever.

In that time, the college has expanded further. Cripps Court dates back to the 1960s, and Ann’s Court is a development of the 21st century – completed now by the wonderful Bartlam library and Quarry Whitehouse auditorium. Again, we wouldn’t have been able to contemplate this work without the backing of alumni and friends; and it was especially heart-warming that more than 1000 people contributed to the final stage of Ann’s Court. Every day we see the bricks and the paving stones and the chairs that individuals bought, and which now contribute to a lovely environment for our students.

The ethos of the college has changed little. We are friendly as ever, though I would say that recent decades have reinforced our intellectual ambition.

There is no point in being one of the best colleges in one of the greatest universities in the world and not wanting to push still further the boundaries of knowledge, and in the tough times we find ourselves we want to enable our students to be the best they can be. A record number of firsts and distinctions attests to their success.

But none of this would be possible without you.

We are a charity, and it is only the backing of past generations that gives us security. It’s not remotely an original thought about a torch passing from one generation to the next; but it’s still the best image of Selwyn’s way forward. You can enable the brightest young people to do extraordinary things, and to make the world a better place. We hope our 140th anniversary confirms our mission, and guarantees our future.

Roger Mosey

Selwyn College Cambridge Development & Alumni Relations Office Selwyn College, Cambridge, CB3 9DQ, UK | Tel: +44 (0) 1223 763937 | email: development@sel.cam.ac.uk www.sel.cam.ac.uk Registered Charity No: 1137517 Photography by: University of Cambridge, Marcus Ginns and David Valinsky.