Last week we went to the launch party of a new book, House & Garden Fifties House by Catriona Gray, looking into the 1950s archive of House & Garden magazine. It’s full of delights, but Jill and I particularly enjoyed this feature, taken from 1959, about the design style of undergraduates’ rooms at Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

The rooms actually look very cool – all Anglepoise lamps and G-Plan furniture. I especially love the pink room with woven saucer chair belonging to an anthropologist and his wife. Yes, wife. The differences are of course fascinating. There are women in scratchy-looking kneelength skirts in this pictures, and the men all look like they work in a bank. Psychedelia and the sexual revolution are lurking off-stage in these pictures, for sure.

Jill and I also had a laugh about how different (and taste free) the student rooms of our own era were. I remember Pulp Fiction and Oasis posters, broken Lava Lamps and – jeez – plasticized sheets. Not in my room mind you. What were your student digs like – we’d love to know.