External refurbishment of the Abingdon and Witney College D Block is nearing completion.
The large hedge, hiding the college, could soon be coming down.
A lot of the rest of the college has already been rebuilt or refurbished. There is a fairly new art block; and more recently engineering buildings, and a vehicle maintenance workshop have been added.
I found a picture of The North Berkshire College of Further Education, as it was called in 1967, on the ATV Television archive site.
The Short Film shows some mums doing an introduction to teaching course; and Mr Comely, the first ever college principal – appointed in 1963 – being interviewed about the course.
Mr Comely retired from the college in 1986, and then became a governor.
The College was renamed as Abingdon College after Abingdon was moved into Oxfordshire in 1974. Then in 2001 the college merged with Witney College to become Abingdon and Witney College. And the hedge has kept growing.
The college used to run lots of recreational evening courses but unfortunately these were cut. We now have to attend the Adult Learning courses at various locations.
The old building looked like a number of other 60s educational buildings in the area – all glass and great for heating the environment! The new one looks much more environmentally friendly – and presumably cheaper to run!
For many years we used The Old Lecture Theatre to show films of The ABCD Film Society and it became clear that refurbishment was badly needed. It will be interesting to see the changes when the work is finally competed.
That’s interesting, I emailed them this week to ask if they could cut the hedge back a bit, as it’s starting to take over that stretch of pavement. I didn’t realise they might be planning to get rid of it altogether.
Janet’s comment accords with my memories. The Times newspaper reports today that during the lifetime of the present Parliament £20billion has been cut from local government budges.
This might explain why so little gets done. Nobody wants public money wasted, but investment in services has taken a very hard knock over the past five years.
I was looking forward to picking up a number of interests in my retirement that would have been traditionally provided by evening classes. There is little prospect of this now.
I do hope that the College is successful in the work it does; and I hope that the refurbishment promotes that success.
I am guessing they will remove the hedge. I saw some planning drawings without the hedge.