So here we are at last, issue 400! It feels like I’ve been working on this forever, but in the best possible way! I started planning it properly back in December, but it’s been on my mind for a lot longer. Celebrating our 400th issue was in my application for EiC, and as I seem to have made a role for myself as Concrete’s resident archivist this year, I always wanted to go big with it! My interest in the archive actually stems back to our last anniversary issue – the 30th birthday in 2022 – when I wrote about the value of Concrete for future historians, and since then I’ve been hooked!
So much of this issue is in debt to our amazing alumni. I put together our alumni survey before Christmas and launched it in January, and it’s been such a joy to see all the stories and pictures that have been sent in. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed, Concrete couldn’t have happened without you when you worked on it, and it couldn’t have happened without you today either. Thanks too to UEA’s Alumni Engagement Manager, William Stileman, who helped us get the survey to as many people as possible!
A special thanks needs to go to Simon Mann, one of Concrete’s founding members and our Advertising Manager for much of the 1990s, for all of the information he sent across, including the original proposal and contracts for the sale of Concrete to the Student Union in 1994. He also provided lots of pictures which he sent across one email at a time, making my Sunday afternoon far more exciting as I anticipated what would be coming next and what other mysteries in the hazy story of Concrete’s past would become clear!
At the heart of this issue is ‘The Concrete Story’ (p.8 – 11), giving as comprehensive a history of our paper as we could in four pages! A massive thank you to Fiona, Eleanor and Eve who’ve really bought into my madly ambitious vision and worked so hard to make it a reality. Thank you as well to all of our section editors who’ve embraced the ‘400’ theme so well across Concrete and Venue.
Don’t think we’re totally stuck in the past! I’m incredibly proud that as we hit this milestone, we have been nominated for 6 awards at this year’s SPAs, and I’d like to wish a massive congratulations to everyone who made them happen! Our entire team is forever making us proud! In other news there is also a new website in the works, so keep an eye out for that soon…
For now though, I’m going to bask in the joy of this issue finally being out there. I’ve got a vague memory from the 30th of Dolly saying it would be our legacy issue – well for me this is definitely ours. I hope years from now, there’s another Editor-in-Chief, maybe as obsessed with the history of Concrete as me, reading this, and I hope we’ve made figuring it all out a bit easier for them!
Happy 400 issues Concrete, and here’s to many more!
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