Oxbridge investors fail to win glittering prizes

Jonathan Davis says that if Britain’s ancient universities want to remain world-class, they should take tutorials from Harvard and Yale in how to invest their endowments

Devotees of the diaries of Harold Nicolson and Alan Clark will feel that they know the cramped apartments at the Albany in Piccadilly as a vicarious second home. It was there that both men would repair after dining and gossiping in clubland; there also, the reader is led to assume, that their extramarital assignations would be consummated. But how many of the millions who pass the Piccadilly entrance to the Albany have ever stopped to wonder who owns the elegant building in which these famous bachelor sets are located? The answer, it turns out, is Peterhouse, the oldest Cambridge college.

In fact, so valuable is the property that it singlehandedly accounts for almost 40 per cent of the published value of the college’s £75 million endowment.