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Concordia Winter 2024

Development and Alumni Relations Update

was hugely generous with his time, his support for the event, and with our pupils and assembled guests. Seeing the Geoffrey Cox Long Room filled to its capacity with the very people that had made the building possible was really special. The public campaign closed on that evening, but we have been delighted that so many have continued to make gifts to the project, most recently a £100,000 donation motivated by the bursary angle of the campaign, taking the total given to the project to £2.43 million. I hope that everyone who has supported our campaign is as proud of the finished product as we are. You have helped build the finest facility of its kind in the country, providing an elite training centre not just for Merchant Taylors’ and Middlesex County Cricket Club, but for the whole community, with local (and not so local) clubs and schools filling the Centre in the evenings and at the weekends. Furthermore, the first bursary has been awarded from the income from lettings, so from September there is a pupil in the school in receipt of a 100% bursary as a result of the Centre and the generosity of all our supporters. Thank you!

2024 has been a very exciting year for the Development and Alumni Relations team, with a huge variety of activity and initiatives taking place. Perhaps the highlight of the year was the opening of the Julian Hill Cricket Centre. As the school prepared to close on 21 December 2023, the school’s project team was handed the keys to the building. This gave us a few days either side of the break to prepare the Centre for the very first training sessions at the beginning of January. Seeing the excitement on the faces of the boys as they entered for the first time and watching the first few deliveries bowled was truly memorable. While we couldn’t persuade him to pad up, the Head Master was clearly over the moon too, and could regularly be found down at the Centre at the end of an afternoon in those early weeks. The Middlesex professionals held their first full week of pre-season training from 8 January, and it was a joy (and a relief) to hear experienced professionals describe it as the best artificial surface they had played on anywhere in the world. In April we were honoured to welcome Sir Andrew Strauss OBE to declare the building officially opened. Sir Andrew

The events calendar has been as busy as ever this year. The focus of the summer months is our OMT decade reunions. This year we welcomed back the Classes of 1984, 1994 and 2004, as well as a joint 50(ish)-year reunion for the Classes of 1971 to 1974. All were really well-attended, thoroughly enjoyable occasions. While it is a hugely busy time for us, we never tire of seeing OMTs reuniting with one another and enjoying returning to their old haunts — sometimes for the first time since they left — as well as catching up with their former teachers. We expect a similarly busy summer in 2025. The autumn brought the Recent Leavers’ Lunch, with 200 of our youngest OMTs and their parents back at school. It also included the small matter of the Triennial Service at St Paul’s Cathedral on 18 October. Because of the size of the school these days we are restricted on space, so we filmed the service this year and you can watch the recording on our YouTube channel. The ever-popular City and Business Network made a triumphant return, with two events in the calendar year. The first, held at the Oriental Club in January, was a great success. The second, hosted by PwC in late November, was fully booked (140 places) within an hour of advertising it. As they are almost as popular as an Oasis reunion tour, you have to be quick off the mark to register, but the events are great opportunities for making new connections for work, as well as for socialising with fellow members of the Merchant Taylors’ community. Also very popular are our London Drinks evenings. Clearly optimally placed geographically, they have worked well in London, but there is no reason why they wouldn’t work elsewhere, so do look out for opportunities to gather informally in other cities around the world, and please do get in touch if you

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Development