THIS book is both a celebration and an analysis of the creation of Liverpool Hope University College in 1996 and of some of its achievements to date, during an exciting period in British higher education. Its contents can only be a reflection of a wider whole. They are selected principally because, in their different ways, they capture something of that whole. In one sense, therefore, they are impressionistic, yet in another they deal with selected substantive issues. So much else that could have been essayed has had to be omitted. For example, no attempt has been made to discuss equally the 20 or so subjects taught in the modern and ever-developing Hope curriculum. Nor is there mention of the research activity that ranges across these subjects. In what follows, such issues come into focus only briefly, simply because they are illustrative of some point being made. All this is designed to make the book a livelier read than it otherwise would have been as a formal chronicle.

For such reasons, this collection of essays should not be read as a standard and traditional history of an institution. It is, rather, a snapshot of the contemporary development of a higher education institution which dates back to its principal origins in Warrington in 1844, in Mount Pleasant in 1856, and in Childwall in 1964. Above all, Liverpool Hope is now a single college community with roots in those earlier beginnings. It is, therefore, successor to a rich educational heritage in Liverpool, its environs and the wider region. For such a long time people have known and benefited from S. Katharine's, Notre Dame and Christ's; names that are part of the older educational and social history of the region. For a time they became the rather aridly styled Liverpool Institute of Higher Education. This could only ever have been the transitional device that it was. Its main and important achievement was that it patiently processed the many changes and rationalisations without which the new single college could not have come about. Liverpool Hope University College, familiarly known as Hope or Liverpool Hope, has now inherited the ring and resonance of the founding college trusts with a conviction that was, perhaps unavoidably, missing in the transitional years. That conviction is expressed in all areas of the modern college life, as will become representatively evident in what follows.