Bradfield College

Bradfield College was founded in 1850 by Thomas Stevens, Rector of Bradfield, as a small Church of England boys' school attached to St Andrew's Church in the Berkshire village of Bradfield. The school sits today on a 200-acre rural campus at Bradfield, in the Thames Valley between Reading and Newbury, with the medieval village church at the centre of the campus. The Headmaster is Dr Christopher Stevens. Bradfield became co-educational in 2005 and today educates around 834 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association.

Bradfield's distinctive academic and cultural tradition is the Bradfield Greek Play — a triennial open-air production of an Ancient Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides) performed in the original Classical Greek, on the school's purpose-built Greek-style amphitheatre carved out of a chalk quarry in 1890. The amphitheatre was modelled on the ancient theatre at Epidaurus, and the Bradfield Greek Play is the longest-continuing English-language open-air Greek tragedy production. Productions have included Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Agamemnon and Bacchae across the past 130 years.

The school's most politically significant modern alumnus is Boris Johnson — Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 2019 to September 2022, Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018 — who attended Bradfield's preparatory school Ashdown House in the 1970s before progressing to Eton. (Johnson's principal school is Eton; the Bradfield connection is only at preparatory school level.)

The theologian and novelist Charles Williams — member of the Oxford Inklings literary circle with J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield, author of the supernatural romances The Place of the Lion, Descent into Hell and All Hallows' Eve, and a significant figure in twentieth-century English Christian letters — was a Bradfield boy. The Daily Telegraph's long-serving Obituaries Editor Hugh Massingberd — who effectively reinvented the English newspaper obituary in the 1980s as a literary form — was at Bradfield. The footballer and BBC sports pundit Mark Lawrenson, the Liverpool and Republic of Ireland defender of the 1980s European Cup years, was a Bradfield boy. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Bradfield Foundation.