This afternoon Lord and Lady Butler joined us to officially name and open the Butler Hall, the first of our 4 extraordinary new facilities, built around even more extraordinary people! It was a fabulous evening, starting with a fanfare written by Joe Atkins and performed by the Senior Brass Group; followed by warm and highly entertaining speeches from Beatrice Barbulescu, our head of school and Lord Butler, our principal guest; poetry written by Nabil Hassan, read by Zayn Hussain and music from Lukas Roberts completed proceedings!
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my predecessor, Mark Dunning, for his vision, creativity, resilience and risk-taking when it came to seeing this highly ambitious plan from drawings to concrete. You will note the number of our thinking skills reflected in that last sentence! Mark’s plan will be complete in less than a year with us opening a new Music & Drama School shortly, an amazing new library and finally, a full refurbishment of the Gardner building housing 21st century Science Labs, Humanities and the Mathematics departments.
It was a really enjoyable evening, thank you Aubrey and team for putting on a fine and fitting spread!
Tim Calvey