100 years: 100 unforgettable things

A lot happens in 100 years. More than any of us can know. But everyone remembers something: a defining moment … a chance encounter … a discovery that captured their imagination, changed their life, or brought their world into focus. Some are the big events that went global; others are personal stories, rich with meaning for the people who experienced them; all are part of our collective history. first 100 years, and set the tone for the next. We’ve gathered them in a book, called Our 100, that you can download free-of-charge from le. ac.uk/centenary/our-100

A university is what we make of it. As is its history. So we asked everyone we know – our students, staff, alumni, neighbours, and collaborators – what was the defining moment or activity in their relationship with the University. We wanted the personal stories as well as the great cultural events and the world-changing, imagination-capturing discoveries.

The response was wonderful: more than 300 suggestions that we whittled down to the 100 of Our 100. No two people will ever agree on what should be in or out of that final selection. But that’s not the point. It’s the impression left by those 100 stories that counts. In our Centenary year, this is as close as we can get to a collective memory.

To bring Our 100 to life, we commissioned a series of 100 illustrations from a team of ethnically diverse illustrators at AmCo Studios Ltd. Their pictures, imagined in a variety of styles (manga, graphic novel, modern illustrative, traditional, and painted), capture the humanity of the stories drawn from our memories and our archives.