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| All Images: De Montfort University Buildings, West Leicester, June 2018 |
The Groves of
Academe do appear to constitute a somewhat transformed landscape since my own days
as a student - as Leicester’s De Montfort University, and its ever-expanding
property portfolio, demonstrate.
That particular institution continues to exert a considerable influence,
both physical and otherwise, on the area of the city close to my own home. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if it might now just really be a huge development corporation, that does a bit of teaching on the side.
Of course, these
days, such effects need not be restricted to the locale in which an
educational institution originated.
It’s not unusual to come across ‘branch offices’ of one city’s Uni. In a
completely different town (or even country) – triggering the kind of cognitive
dissonance implied by such an appellation as, ‘Loughborough University,
London’. The opportunity to absorb some
prime real estate in a bigger, more glamourous location must be irresistibly
tempting to the business managers of such organisations, but the implications
of the images shown here, are somewhat staggering - even by 'DMUglobal’s' ambitious
standards.
The whys and
wherefores of all that are clearly open to debate. In fact, it’s actually the strange perpetual
shift, and distinctly 'meta' nature, of these images, that fascinate me more. There’s something both captivating and
perplexing about the insertion of one vast, globally recognisable, virtual skyline
into another, smaller and more parochial, (albeit very familiar to me), one. The physical
manifestation is actually be fairly mundane and explicable, I suppose, although the scale all-enveloping nature of that PR image are pretty spectacular. Either way, I still can’t quite get my head around the delicious
paradox conjured by the juxtaposition of these two panoramas.
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