Reclaiming Our Premises

The Society’s home is both its major asset and its most potent identifier. Over the years it has allowed the Society to develop its programmes and offer a wide range of services to members, becoming in the process the emblem from which much of the Society’s character and personality have evolved.

However, like all historic buildings, Waterhouse’s Cambridge masterpiece has proven expensive to maintain; so much so that the Society has been forced to seek ways of making ends meet by means other than the membership subscription alone. For more than 20 years, the Society has leased substantial parts of its premises to commercial tenants: a happy example of ingenuity and opportunistic business acumen, but a solution not without consequences for the Society’s ability to promote its own activities and meet its expanding ambitions. As a consequence, the Society remains ever more dependent on income from leases but less and less able to provide space appropriate and sufficient to its properly expanding needs.

A critical medium-term ambition is to reclaim the whole of the Waterhouse property and put it to Society use. This means that we must, at the very least, make good and preferably enhance the income currently derived from leases (c £160,000 pa). Such “replacement” monies could be derived either from income from an increased endowment or through a mature Annual Fund.

Enabling the Union to reclaim possession of its entire premises is a key objective of the 200th Anniversary Campaign.