CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART
Cambridge School of Art, the original School of Art was founded by William John Beamont and opened in 1858 by renowned British art critic, draughtsman, watercolourist, and prominent social thinker John Ruskin. Its original location was near Sidney Sussex College, later moving to its present location in East Road, Cambridge. Legendary cartoonist and graphic artist Ronald Searle studied here, as did Edward Bawden, one of Britain’s greatest graphic artists, illustrators and printmakers, and Gustav Metzger (1926-2017), the pioneer of auto-destructive art. In 1953 Odile Crick (19202007), a lecturer at Cambridge School of Art, drew the original sketch of the DNA double helix, to illustrate the pioneering work by geneticists Crick and Watson at Cambridge University. During the highly creative and experimental 1960s, the School was home to many talented tutors and gifted students, including caricaturists Roger Law and Peter Fluck of Spitting Image fame and Pink Floyd members Syd Barrett and Dave Gilmour, who played one of their first gigs from the balcony of the Ruskin studios at Christmas 1966. Other alumni and staff have included Chloe Cheese, Adrian Ryan, Walter Hoyle, Paul Hogarth and Principal John Bolam. In 1960 this became the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (CCAT) and in 1989 CCAT merged with the Essex Institute of Higher Education to form the Anglia Higher Education College. The merged college became a polytechnic in 1991, using the name Anglia Polytechnic, and was then awarded university status in 1992. The art school has since grown grew to become an integral part of Anglia Ruskin University, and it’s still at the heart of the modern-day campus in Cambridge.
Website: https://www.aru.ac.uk