Wye College (RIP)
Something that always goes down well at work is the Christmas – “Guess who the hell that is” competition. I ask people in the office to submit photos of themselves as children, they’re compiled into a big Microsoft Powerpoint presentation and everybody has simply bags of fun trying to guess who is who.
There’s a fair amount of contextual information used to determine who is actually who. For instance, you can assess the haircuts, the clothes, or in Bella’s case, the fact she was in a McDonald’s high chair circa 1991-1994.
This year we decided to switch things round and ask for pictures of everyone as moody teenagers. And it was during this search for myself as a sullen eighteen-year-old that I found a photo I didn’t know I had (pictured above).
It was taken when I was 18 and particularly interested in the person in the foreground. What’s interesting to me now is that it was taken in front of the greenhouses of the Wye College horticultural unit, just off the Olantigh Road, in Wye, Kent.
Wye College was the agricultural college of London University, located on the river Stour between Ashford and Canterbury. Wye is a beautiful village and the college was a grand affair with buildings dating back to the 18th century arranged in quadrangles. It was like someone had taken a Cambridge college and deposited it in the middle of a Kentish village. In later years it was attached to Imperial College, who closed it, or, to use the perfect agricultural analogy, sent it to the knackers’ yard.
When I was there it offered degrees in agriculture, horticulture and my degree was the aptly named Rural Environmental Studies. I say aptly, because the received wisdom these days is that any degree with the word ‘Studies’ in cannot be a proper degree. And once graduated with an RES degree in your pocket, prospective employers took a similar view.
We did a mixture of everything; ecology with the genial professor Bryn Green who taught us how ecosystems could be affected by grazin’, burnin’, and mowin’, soil science, agricultural economics, town and country planning; we were the jacks of all trades and the masters of none.
At the time I had absolutely no interest in gardening or horticulture, yet Wye, it turns out, was the place where the great Christopher Lloyd once lectured, where Chris Baines studied for his degree, and where a lot of the great and the good in the UK gardening world learned their basics (Chris Ireland-Jones of Avon Bulbs for example, or Keith and Ros Wiley in Devon).
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Now I wish, I had paid more attention to the optional horticulture units I could have taken at Wye. My interest, like the wavering focus of the 35mm Yashica, should have been in the background.
