The Real-World History of St Cedd’s

As much as we’d love there to be a real St Cedd’s, with a Professor Chronotis pottering about his TARDIS, offering us lumpy milk for our tea, there sadly is not.

In the words of Douglas Adams, who invented the fictional college:

‘St Cedd’s College … owes a little to my memories of St John’s College, Cambridge, although I’ve also borrowed indiscriminately from other colleges as well. The point is that St Cedd’s College is a completely fictitious assemblage, and no correspondence is intended between any institutions or characters in this book and any real institutions or people, living, dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment.

St Cedd’s appears in the unfinished/finished-in-many-forms serial Shada, prompting the second Lord President of CUDWS to ‘found’ the college, build a website and install himself as its Master (because he liked puns)!