The Idea of a University-London Tale (REFLECTION)
By Nobert Chiazor
Awesome wonder captured my awe, as the eyes voraciously scanned the University of East London.
Bedecked in breathtaking Renaissance architecture, the university is embedded between Romford Street and Water Lane, two miles from the famous Olympic centre in Stratford city, United Kingdom.
I once saw the university in 2014, but it was a fleeting experience as the taxi that drove me through, did not give a minute for introspection.
Now 10 years later, on this windy wintry morning, brooding with chilly showers, the ethereal beauty of this university embraced my being.
Cascading from the sky, with generous enchanting elegance, the eerie presence conspicuously dwarfed other buildings in its busy neighbourhood.
The University of East London has been standing for 132 years, beginning as a technical institute under the Borough of West Ham.
Designed by British architects James Glen Sivewright Gibson and Samuel Bridgman Russell under the partnership Gibson & Russell, the square tower combined Roman and Greek traditions of material culture to deepen its origin.
Engraved on the exterior niches are iconic carvings depicting arts, science, music and engineering.
The images of two female figures carved on the forepart, welcoming guests are so graceful and real that their luscious poise could tempt the most puritanical of bystanders to dare a kiss.
The Construction foreman, W.B. Rhind who reportedly introduced the feminine touch obviously must have been endowed with the steez of aesthetics.
The vintage tower has featured in high-impact architecture journals as one of the finest, spanning design genres of various eras -Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical and Ultra-modern styles.
The charm of the university, however, goes beyond its iconic history and architectural mould.
It is among the top British universities, a clime with rich tapestry of academic distinction, being home to world-class institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, Kings College, Leeds, London School of Economics and so on.
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) once adjudged the University of East London’s research culture as ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’
A cameo tour of the university left one with lessons as profound as encounter with ‘IJELE’ masquerade of Eastern Nigeria or the mystique of Egwugwu in my ancestral home, watched from the eyes of a child and bloom of adulthood, growing up at Idumuje Unor, a community in present Delta state, Nigeria.
The University of East London story vividly reminds us of the extraordinary treatise “The Idea of a University ” (1852) written by John Henry Newman, English academic, theologian and philosopher.
Newman viewed University as centre of truth and ultimate trove of the cultivated man.
He particularly objectified the university as “the force, the steadiness and the versatility of intellect,” with “a connected view or grasp of things”
As I sauntered towards Westfield, the idea of a university kept ringing – eeeh East London!
But something else parted my lips…
Thank heavens for home -grown forerunner thinkers of university – Zik, Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello. I sighed as the swift escalator lifted me along with a sea of human heads into Primark…
