COUNTRY LIFE I SPENT an afternoon this July in going
over the first of the rural colleges (new style) situated within the aura of Cambridge. A party of us went there from a neighbouring county for the sake of imitation: such colleges are likely to be multiplied. Thc county councils are interested, and even farmers are sitting up and taking notice. The central idea is to provide a senior elementary school of an extra spaciousness compared with the old and greater scope for the rural bias, and at the same time to provide culture and amusement for adults. The school ends in the afternoon and the culture begins towards evening, when music, drama, debates, games, common room recreation and lectures of many sorts have free play. This double use demands. a new sort of architecture to which American but not as yet British architects have paid proper attention ; and great success has been reached in internal arrangements, though it is difficult to make the traditional eye approve of the exterior, with its flattened roofs and queer windows. It is a really marvellous tribute to a comparatively new venture that a good quarter of the complete population of the villages within its orbit take some share in the college's activities. The weakness seemed to me to lie in the turning, so to say, of the rural bias. Gardening and farming and the rural crafts, carpentry excepted, seemed to me to receive less encouragement than, say, the drama or debatings. However, the central idea is admirable and will certainly be widely followed I hear of cheap offers of land, if not such magnificent free gifts as this Cambridge memorial to Mr. Chivers.
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