ABSTRACT
The long queues, media interest and artistic collective talent suggested a new beginning, with Britain as the 'hip' heart of culture just as it had been thirty years before when new artists had led the way. The leading British music groups seemed to be affected by management culture, despite their reinvigoration of pop music. The British university system has greatly changed over the last hundred years. At the beginning of the century only a tiny proportion of the population enjoyed higher education. The older universities have almost entirely resisted or ignored this rhetoric so that educational division between the haves and have nots may even grow because of wider university access. Oxford and Cambridge still retained iron links to the Church of England. As the twentieth century slowly moved through the last years of its final decade a new sense of hope and purpose pervaded anticipations of the millennium.
