When I started at LAC, I'd not long been made redundant at the Oxford Union, where I was cataloguer for several years. I'd been very fortunate in having found a temporary two month post at the Geography Library before being taken on to run the centre's library as maternity leave cover.
LAC is a very friendly warm place and I was immediately made to feel welcome. The atmosphere is more like a family home than an academic institution and was such a contrast to the formal Union. I'd been happy at the Union but it is a strange, unreal sort of place, where people play up to a particularly competitive and abrasive Oxford role.
Being at LAC restored my humanity, I felt at the time--I could sense myself coming back to life.
I was really pleased to be able to return there as site librarian and subject consultant last September.
It's a surprisingly busy place, though, and one always runs out of time. This afternoon was no exception.
The church in the picture, St Philip and St James, is now the Centre for Mission Studies. The building LAC occupies was the original vicarage. Tony Benn proposed to his future wife while sitting on a bench beneath the spire. He subsequently bought the bench for his garden.
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