Ultimately, I chose my University because its campus looked lovely in snow. It snowed on my Open Day and I was smitten. It wasn't that great a department for my subject (Politics). Staid, small and right wing, focusing almost exclusively on Western Europe and the USA, with just Soviet & Eastern European Politics outside that (I did that module in 1987-88 but deferred the exam until 1989, thinking that not much would change in the interim, oh woe!)
Recently I had a chat with a friend who attended Durham University at about the same time, and admitted that she still hasn't been in Durham Cathedral. We agreed that we wasted our student years. I went into Nottingham often enough, for entertainment, shopping, drinking, transit, but never went to the Trent (except to cross it on the way to Nottingham Forest's ground). And, given I was living on such a glorious out-of-town campus, I feel ashamed at how little advantage I took of it. Walks, if not to lectures, tutorials or the library were to the Portland building or to other Halls. Occasional boating expeditions on the glorious lake. I suspect that I 'went for a walk' less than half a dozen times and probably only twice on my own.
I still haven't found a boating lake to match the one at University Park. It felt like an adventure, rowing beyond and around the island, the full length. One day there was a Midsummer's Day rock festival; out on the lake in a rowing boat was a splendid way to enjoy part of it.
I took fewer photos then than now - constrained by the cost of film and developing. And most of my photos were, rightly, of the people I spent my time with. Even so, I am shocked at how few photos I took of campus on my three years there (2 in Hall, one living in Dunkirk, just a stone's throw away). And these are the best of them.
