From 1996 though until 1998 I attended Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge. During that time I studied for five A-levels, took 4 A-levels, learnt how to party, partied, and plotted a legendary prank.
We were inspired by some Cambridge engineering students who had, the story went, placed a car on top of a university building. They did so by dismantling it and then reassembling it at the top making it impossible to get back down again without a similar process of deconstruction. A fun project by all accounts. Our first plan was to put a 2CV in the student common area which was the basement level of the front of the building. However, the security was a bit tight to pull this off - the previous year students had glue-gunned various door locks around school - so we knew there were going to be patrols (leaked information from friendly physics department staff). Instead we eventually decided to place a car around a tree. It went like this…
My next door neighbour was a farmer and had access to various bits of farming equipment - as luck would have it, this included a trailer. We borrowed the trailer and went up to a scrap yard on the outskirts of Cambridge. After ambling around we eventually found an old Metro which was small enough for our purposes but still pretty much intact. Somehow or other we ended up paying an outrageous £40 to remove this from the scrap yard - the group of us were clearly not born negotiators. We got it home to my back garden and started stripping it down and making measurements. Myself and Nik drove into town to college and measured the tree that we were planning to put it round - the diameter and, since it was leaning quite a bit, the distance it leaned over at the height of the car. My A-level maths and physics came in very slightly handy; not.
Then came two days of work with angle grinders and jigsaws in order to cut through the floor, beams and other parts of the car. The design we came up with was to split the car into two - front and back - such that we could join it together again around the tree. As well as cutting a well measured hole in the floor and removing part of the roof we also cut through the four main beams and cut four pieces of wood that fitted snugly inside the beams. These were later used to join the car back together with screws through the beam sides (I still prefer to encourage the myth that we actually welded it back together on site - but that would have been too much of a fire risk for the ‘patrol’ to allow).
On the day before the upper sixth’s last day there was a little drama as there was confusion over the availability of the trailer - fortunately it was sorted out and the two pieces of the car were loaded onto the trailer. At about midnight or so, Nik and I headed into college to meet a few others who were assisting us. En route we picked up a police car who started following us (can’t imagine why we looked suspicious)! They left us at the college gate though and we parked up as close as possible to the target quad and tree. With assistants in tow we unloaded the two bits of the car and rolled them into the quad and started the slightly finicky process of reassembly. I guess it took about 45 minutes in all, during which time the patrol made themselves known to stop us firing up a non-existant welding torch (point proven). A few photos were taken and then we all headed home ready for the next day.
Well - this is what awaited the couple of thousand students at Hills Road the next morning:
And here is Chris, Nik and myself working in my back garden:
There was quite a lot of buzz around the college about it, with various people trying to claim it was their art project. So there you have a little bit of history - the story behind the car. I’d like to say it remained there forever, but it was disappointingly removed about five months later.
As an epilogue… about two or three years later I was at my aunt and uncles in Dorset for Christmas. The topic of school pranks came up and one of my cousins started telling us about this prank she’d heard of from a friend where some guys had put a car around a tree….. hence why I feel confident describing it as legendary in the first paragraph. A lot of fun and something I’m unlikely to forget.