The building had just been built, as far as I know that these photos here of research students, we know that at least one of them called Wagstaff, who's here subsequently 10 years later died in the Second World War.

He was on a bomber, which disappeared and never returned behind these photos.

There are very riel personal stories.

There are some quite strange things people smoking pipes some of you may know, even know what a pipe is.

Wooden thing for smoking tobacco.

They're not wearing safety glasses.

There's loads of chemicals everywhere.

It's pretty untidy than the women.

I suppose that's not so surprising because even when I was a student, there weren't many women chemists.

These labs were brand new when the photo had been taken on DDE.

We're in a really lucky position that I can show you some labs that are also brand new.

They were opened two weeks ago, so let's go upstairs and see what differences weaken spoke.

Before we go up, I should show you my tie special tie with test tubes and things on it.

What's really special is that here, Jim Gamble, set it on fire with white phosphorus in the middle of a lecture.

Before we go in, let me stress this is a teaching lab.

It's for science, technology, engineering and math that what the mathematicians will do in this lab, I'm not so so the first thing you noticed.

Everything's white.

The benches await the lab coats, a weight where you can see in the photo.

That bench is a dark, and I think they don't lab coats our darkest color.

The next thing you notice, it's enormous compared to this lab in the photo.

There many more students.

This is partly because there are many more students in universities than they were in the 19 thirties.

There, lots more fume cupboards in the photo.

There's perhaps one, and you can see here their tomb couples everywhere.

The other thing that's really funny is that some of the fume comforts have transparent backs, So if we go around here, you can see the students working away without even needing to wear safety glasses on dhe.

At the same time, frightened them away.

It's good for them because if I want to demonstrate something, they can stand around this side on, watch what I'm doing.

Brady is really excited because he can imagine videoing Neil from a completely different angle, seeing what is really thinking when he doesn't speak.

So we can walk along this corridor to get to the middle part of the lab on again.

You'll see they're quite big difference is one of the things you see immediately is that the people who are teaching are wearing colored lab coats like me so that the students can immediately see who can help them way have red coats in organic chemists and the green ones over there are the organic chemists.

So that's also an innovation, mixing up organic chemists and in organic chemists together.

It makes the lab much more flexible.

It means you don't need tohave.

All the equipment duplicated.

One of the things that hasn't changed very much from this photo is the sink you can see here.

There's still a sink with relatively similar taps, but the difference is that the sinks now made out of plastic rather than porcelain or china so that If you drop some glassware in there, it doesn't break, you see, so you don't have to pay for it.

But students nowadays don't have to pay for their glassware anyway.

In the old days, some students had to finish their calls early because they couldn't pay for the glassware that they were breaking.

Dreadful.

There's one difference from really quite recent labs there.

Lots and lots of fire extinguishes.

When I was teaching in the lab on the floor below, a student set fire to the bench and it took me a long time to find the fire extinguisher on.

By then, the bench was really blazing away.

Once we put it out for years I saw this child Mark every time I went into the lab.

The most exciting thing about this lab is something which you might not have noticed.

This'll bench here, which has taps, is fixed just like the benches in the old labs which will fix down and had to stay there for years and years and years.

But a ll the other benches that you can see in both directions are on wheels on dso.

If we suddenly decide, we'd like to change the way we teach this particular class in an afternoon, we can completely change the configuration of the lab move.

The benches around could move the electrical power around, and so are the key to the flexibility.

Are these sort of elephant trunks?

Because what these air doing?

They contain the electrical power to the benches, the Internet connections and, of course, the pipes for the piped nitrogen and compressed air that you have on the benches on the water.

Apart from the basins where you wash your hands and some glass where all the water is in the fume cupboards, I haven't mentioned gas.

We all think of Bunsen burners in labs.

There's no guests in this lab, so how do they heat things up?

The answer is, with a gas gun like this, I had to be taught how to use it a few minutes ago.

You clip it down on, the flavor comes out.

The door of the feud cupboard is automated like a lift.

You press the button.