Jude Rowley | Lancaster University
To many, architectural history is concerned with the imposing grandeur of great palaces and dreaming spires, or the intimidating scale of the industrial scene and the sprawling metropolis. Nonetheless, amidst the picturesque and the vast, there remains a place for the objects left behind, the architectural features that litter every-day built environments without meriting a mention. Rarely planned with the same meticulous attention as urban centres or spectacular cathedrals, such features are nonetheless a material element of lived environments and are experienced in their own way by the people who inhabit these places.
Such features are often hidden in plain sight, scattered amongst more prominent and enduring architectural features. Lancaster University’s campus, largely an ode to clumsy 1960s municipal brutalism and late modernism, is no exception. An example of this inadvertently featured in a recent photography exhibition commemorating the University’s sixtieth anniversary. One photograph depicted a scene well known to each of the 170,000 alumni who have passed through Lancaster University. Its focus is Alexandra Square, the central hub of the campus envisioned by its architects, overlooked by the steadfast residential high-rise at the far corner (Bowland Tower). However, centred in the foreground is a less familiar feature in the form of a mysterious stone ball, mounted on a plinth in the corner of the square.
At first sight it is non-descript, perhaps not even out of place amidst the pedestrian grey and beige uniformity of the initial campus buildings. Nonetheless, it is profoundly different to the rest of the visible scene. It is at odds with the practical design of the campus, where everything had a place and was designed with a function. From the covered ‘spine’ to protect from the invariably dreary Lancashire weather to the central underpass to divert bus traffic away from the pedestrianised campus, the architects Peter Shepheard and Gabriel Epstein left little to chance and meticulously designed each element of the campus to serve a purpose. However, there are few things less practical than a misshapen ball of rock, and so this mysterious ‘orb’ marks an unusual inclusion. Even when the campus was barely finished in the late 1960s, there was a place for the ‘orb’. It is, however, no longer in place on the University campus.
This leads the viewer to speculate: what was this ‘orb,’ centred in a prominent place at the heart of the University campus from the outset? Why was it there? And what happened to it?
Given that it sits atop a display plinth that appears purpose-built, the first speculation might be that the ‘orb’ formed a part of some kind of art installation. In its early years, the University campus became a showground for modernist art, with a resident community of artists funded by Granada fellowships and a dedicated Embellishments Committee working to adorn the newly built site with works of artistic interest. Many of these remain in place, such as sculptor-in-residence (1968-71) John Hoskin’s untitled aluminium work on the side of the Physics Building and Anne Hirsch-Henecke’s 1972 concrete bas-relief ‘Daphne’ in the County South quadrangle (formerly Cartmel College). In keeping with the abstract character of the former and the grey material basis of the latter, the ‘orb’ might fit well with this wave of embellishing works. However, though there are detailed accounts of the artistic works installed across the site in the early years, no mention is made among these of any ‘orb’ or ball of stone as part of the early 1970s wave of art installations.
With the possibility of it being an art installation discounted, the surrounding setting might lead to an assumption that the ‘orb’ was an architectural feature associated with the striking brutalist style employed elsewhere across the campus. It evokes notable brutalist designs, like the spherical laboratories of East Berlin (the ‘Akademiebusen’) or the ‘sphere’ from the experimental post-1968 Casa Albero in Fregene, Italy. Closer to home, orb motifs feature prominently in the works of local artist Tom Mellor, such as his watercolours ‘The Technocrat’ and ‘Architectural Arrangement’. Both were produced while Mellor was working as an architect planning the campus and were later acquired by the University. Mellor designed the University Library, which sits opposite the site of the ‘orb’, and was involved in planning various aspects of the campus setting.
However, Mellor’s style tended more towards modernism than brutalism and the library was built not in concrete, but Lancaster’s distinctive ‘biscuit brick’. It is elsewhere on the campus that brutalism reigns. Nowhere is this more prominent than the original County College building, now widely referred to as ‘County Main’. Along with Preston Bus Station, County College is the architectural triumph of its age, showcasing a distinctly Lancashire-inflected brutalism. It is Wilson’s Britain cast in concrete: technologically innovative, in that the entire building was constructed from just ten precast elements, but sensitive to tradition, deliberately recalling Oxonian collegiate quadrangles. Funded by the local authority and designed by the Lancashire County Council architect, Roger Booth, it is a monument to the disruptive spirit of the University’s early years. In a sense, it is to Lancaster what Christ Church is to Oxford and marked a practical reimagining of the university building for the age of the plate-glass campus.
However, unlike County College, a closer look at the ‘orb’ reveals that it was not cast in concrete but instead displays the distinctive granular texture of coarse sandstone. Nonetheless, the County College building does hold an indirect clue to the origins of the ‘orb’. Rarely is the story of its construction told without reference to the ancient oak tree at its centre. According to local legend, this tree had been spared by an agricultural labourer on the Bigforth estate two hundred years earlier and was subsequently spared again by workmen constructing the college. The concrete quadrangle was built around the tree, preserving it and providing the new college with an enduring symbol. Constructing the campus on largely undeveloped farmland required planners and builders to adapt to the surrounding conditions, even where these were not anticipated prior to breaking ground.
Rather than a sculpture or a planned architectural feature, the ‘orb’ is a product of a similar story, though one far less well known than that of the County oak. It was not constructed for the new campus at all but was instead unearthed during its construction. It is a boulder, more specifically a glacial erratic, deposited by the movement of a glacier during the Last Glacial Period tens of thousands of years ago. It thus predates the University by millennia. It was uncovered during the construction of the Bailrigg site and identified not by a geologist, but by the eminent industrial economist, P.W.S. (Philip) Andrews. Once identified, the decision was taken by university planners not to dispose of the erratic but to display it prominently on the new campus site. It was perhaps also Andrews who influenced the unorthodox placing of the erratic atop a plinth in the central square. He was a keen amateur sculptor, and during his short tenure as a Lancaster professor between 1967 and his death in 1971, his former students recall that his office was filled with all manner of sculptures and striking artworks.
In between its ice age origins and its unearthing in the 1960s, the erratic may have been used to top a gatepost at one of the farmsteads around Bailrigg Moor, and so may have an even longer past connecting it to its built environment. In any case, after its installation between 1967 and 1969, it occupied a prominent place on the University campus for four decades. It remained there until autumn 2007, when it was removed ahead of the coming academic year.
The area previously occupied by the erratic was subsequently landscaped. In its place, a cast of the Barbara Hepworth sculpture ‘Dual Form’ (created 1965, acquired by the University in 1973) was installed in December 2007, relocated from its former location outside of the Great Hall. The whereabouts of the erratic have been publicly unknown ever since. Questions about its fate were raised in the alternative staff newsletter subtext in 2007, 2008, and 2017, but the erratic has otherwise attracted little attention since it was removed two decades ago.
This is exacerbated by the fact that, at a university, institutional memory is inherently short. Only members of the University community who have been at Lancaster for over 18 years can claim to remember the ‘orb’ firsthand. It otherwise exists only in the vague recollections of those who once walked past it and in historic photographs of Alexandra Square. There are hundreds of photographs of Alexandra Square facing Bowland Tower, but few of the glacial erratic that once occupied its far corner. In the age prior to the smartphone, it was rarely deemed notable enough to commit to film compared to other campus landmarks. For possibly similar reasons, it did not feature on maps of the newly built University site after the move to Bailrigg was completed in 1970. The non-descript and the everyday often go unrecorded, leaving gaps for those seeking to recover material histories of the built environment.
As a result of its relative obscurity even when in place and its subsequent demise, the ‘orb’, or the erratic, remains unknown to recent generations of students. However, after almost two decades out of the public eye, the erratic is still held in storage by the University. It has found a temporary home at Forrest Hills, close to the site once earmarked for the construction of the second part of the University’s original campus, which was never completed after an economic downturn in the early 1970s. Plans to make use of the erratic have never been abandoned and there is some prospect that with wide enough support from students and staff it might find a new home somewhere on campus. Even if its utility as a teaching resource to students of Geography and Environmental Science is limited, and its appeal as a work of urban art is unlikely to displace prized bronze casts, it remains a tangible symbol of the University’s early history.
Monuments need not be grand statues or imposing memorials. The University campus is replete with physical remnants and commemorations of the past hidden in plain sight. These range from the memorial stone for the late sociologist, John Urry, in the overgrowth behind the new Margaret Fell lecture theatre, to the plaque commemorating Elizabeth Nelson, murdered on a secluded country lane in 1866 on the site now occupied by Grizedale College. Many present-day inhabitants of the University campus are likely unaware of such features or their origins, even those who walk past them on a daily basis, but they are nonetheless elements with a role to play in the built environment.
The ‘orb’ could perhaps have a future along similar lines and other institutions might be looked to for inspiration. A glacial erratic (the ‘Aston Webb boulder’) at Birmingham University, though much larger than Lancaster’s, was similarly discovered during an excavation during campus construction in 1909. It had gone unmarked and largely ignored for over a century, until a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant supported its conversion into a popular public attraction on the campus in 2022/23 with supporting signs and publicity. If the Lancaster erratic is to have a second life as a feature of the campus landscape, it might be along similar lines.
The University is transient and adaptive and, perhaps like the erratic, has multiple histories. Engaging with these requires a recognition that the built environment is what those who inhabit it are willing to make of it. This confronted Lancaster’s founding Vice-Chancellor, Charles Carter, who chastised early students for bemoaning that ‘Lancaster is a dull place’. Having overseen the construction of a new campus that captured the spirit of the University and the era in which it was forged, he fired back that ‘dullness resides not in places. But in people who think that places are dull’.
Further Reading
Marion E. McClintock, University of Lancaster: Quest for Innovation (A History of the First Ten Years, 1964-1974) (University of Lancaster, 1974).
Jamie Woodward, The Ice Age: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014) see chapter 2: ‘Erratic Boulders and the Diluvium’.
Tony Birks, Building the New Universities (David and Charles, 1972).
M.G. Simpson (ed.), Planning University Development: University of Lancaster (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1972).
Peter Meusburger, Michael Heffernan, and Laura Suarsana (eds.), Geographies of the University (Springer, 2018).
Jude Rowley is joint Coordinating Editor at EPOCH Magazine and a PhD candidate in International Relations (IR) based in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University. Beyond his PhD research on the disciplinary history of IR, he is also interested in revisiting the forgotten histories of Lancaster University.
With thanks to Ian Sturzaker, Landscape Manager at Lancaster University