Alumnus of the Year Award
Orations and responses
Stephen Feber
Oration given on 14 July 2004
Chancellor, the University of Essex Foundation has determined
that STEPHEN FEBER shall be the recipient of the Alumnus of the Year
Award for 2004
Later this year the University will celebrate its 40th anniversary. In
that time, over 50,000 Essex students have graduated and gone on to make
their mark in the world. The Alumnus of the Year award was
introduced in 2002 as a way of highlighting the many rich contributions
that Essex alumni make in business, science, the arts and the wider
community. Each year we now honour the achievements of one alumnus
whose successes have affected others positively, and who hence
represents an exemplary ideal of what our present year group of
graduands gathered here today might seek to accomplish in years to
come. For who knows? – with us in this lecture hall may very well be
sitting several future winners of the award.
This year we have chosen someone who has had an illustrious succession
of senior roles in some of the UK’s leading museums, galleries and
innovative visitor attractions. After graduating from us in 1980 with
an M.A. in Literature, Stephen Feber achieved early success in his
career when he was appointed as Development Director of Eureka, the
first children's museum in the U.K. This multi-award winning museum
established itself as a true innovator of the sector and attracted
millions of new visitors to Halifax, leading to regeneration of the
area. He went on to direct one of the National Trust’s most popular
properties, Quarry Bank Mill, a working textile mill in
Cheshire. This Mill is distinguished by its interpretation of living
history, and its re-enactment of the cotton processes though drama and
daily demonstration. Between 1995 and 1998 Stephen Feber established
the new museum service of York, comprising the three main institutions
of York City Art Galleries, York Museum and the Castle Museum.
Overlapping that post in 1997 and 1998 was his work on a further urban
regeneration project, St Helen’s World of Glass, a £14 million
visitor attraction that mixes commercial production of glass with
education and heritage elements.
But Stephen Feber’s crowning achievement to date has arguably been his
contribution to the Magna Centre between 1998 and 2002, initially as a
consultant, and then as its Chief Executive. He led this £52 million
project from its conception, through design, development, building (on
time and within budget), to its opening moment and early years of
operation. Let us therefore focus for just a little longer on the Magna
Centre itself, and upon what Stephen Feber brought to the initiative.
Magna is a science adventure centre based in a large converted
steelworks at Templeborough near Rotherham in Yorkshire. It is an
attraction which has brought regeneration to a deprived area of South
Yorkshire and won a series of high profile awards. Under Stephen
Feber’s stewardship this conversion of a former industrial space won the
Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Award for Building of
the Year in 2001; incidentally beating off strong competition from the
initially better-known Eden Project in Cornwell. And whereas other
Lottery funded ventures such as the Millennium Dome and the National
Centre for Popular Culture in Sheffield have been somewhat notorious
instances of projects which failed to achieve the successes originally
aimed for, the Magna Centre, under Stephen Feber’s management, housing
as it does interactive challenges and spectacular shows in four
pavilions named after the elements, year on year exceeded the projected
visitor figures in popularity, so as to become one of the nation’s best
loved and most educational of attractions. Stephen Feber’s own highest
goal in all the projects he has tackled – one that he has lectured on
extensively - is that of influencing and enhancing the learning
opportunities of the next generation. The Magna Centre, for instance,
includes a centre for educational technology, robotics unit, creative
partnerships project and adventure playground. Land values have doubled
since Magna opened, new offices and a business park are being built.
Despite Magna’s success Stephen believes there is a long way to go
before informal learning, the education sector and the media are
properly linked to form an effective supply chain to support our human
resources in science and technology.
In 2002 Stephen Feber formed his own company to focus on regeneration
and development. He is currently working across Yorkshire on urban
regeneration projects for the Regional Development Agency. He is also
developing a £300 million project, Rapid City, for the Science
Musuem in York which will integrate sustainable transport, urban living
and a new cultural quarter for the historic City. He is also working
for the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts on
creativity in science teaching in schools in Yorkshire and Lancashire.
Lastly, he runs courses on effective leadership for the construction
industry and housing associations.
In short, Stephen Feber has reached that point in his career when he is
something of a regenerative institution in his own right; a crucial mind
in the thinking going on not in one sole project at a time, but within
many aspects of urban development, museum and visitor-attraction
planning, together with their deep tie-in with educational opportunity
in some of the formerly more deprived areas and sectors of our society.
We honour him today for almost a quarter of a century’s innovative,
cutting-edge planning and development projects. If today we have
visitor attractions and urban regeneration schemes that show us our
industrial and architectural past as never before whilst also
stimulating us to re-think our goals for future development in arts,
science and industry, it is largely because of the outstanding
achievements of a figure such as Stephen Feber.
Chancellor, I present Stephen Feber
Orator: Dr Jonathan White