75 years of… ASL field trips!

This is the first in our series looking back at 75 years of ASL. We’ve grown, moved, and changed quite a bit since 1951, but some things—like ASL’s commitment to building global citizens, in part through travel around London, the UK, and the wider world—have stayed the same! In this story, we’ll take a peek back in time at just a few of the thousands of memorable field trips that have made ASL special over the past three-quarters of a century.

For more ASL history, please visit our brand new online timeline!

The American School in London carries a sense of movement in its name—and from its very inception in the early 1950s, movement has been a cornerstone of an ASL education. “Tours to places of historical, cultural and scientific interest are a regular feature of the curriculum. Students are given every chance to witness occasions of national interest as well as historical locations and museums,” ASL’s founding headmaster, Stephen L. Eckard (ASL 1951–71), once said of the earliest Eagles’ experience of the School.

In 2005, Tim Blick ’64 recalled fond memories of attending ASL in the late 1950s: “As a class, we would journey out every Wednesday morning to see some new part of English history, be it the planetarium, Madame Tussaud’s, or the British Museum. We would always sit upstairs on the double-decker bus and return just before 3 pm.” 

These Wednesday field trips were, in fact, a school-wide requirement during ASL’s early days—but field trips could also (and often did!) happen outside of these mid-week excursions, and they weren’t always strictly educational.

In the 1960 all-school yearbook—ASL’s first!—high school student editors wrote, “As Christmas [1959] drew near, the seniors retired to Hampshire for a day of Christmas tree chopping directed by the chief of the tribe, Mr. Eckard. This was carried out on a magnificent level in brilliant drizzle with ensuing sniffles and sore muscles. The booty was brought back by truck and the seniors in a baggage car accompanied by Her Majesty’s soldiers.”

Grade 5 students, meanwhile, recalled in that same yearbook their own 1959–60 trips to London’s Science Museum, Natural History Museum, and Kensington Palace, and looked forward to an upcoming visit to the ZSL London Zoo, while Grades 1 and 2 discussed zoo trips aplenty, and the many underwater creatures they had seen on an aquarium visit.

In 1974, Music Tour took place for the first time, with ASL’s stage band visiting The Hague for their inaugural overseas trip. In 2026—52 years later!—ASL’s high school band visited The Hague on Music Tour once again, playing a warehouse venue in addition to a joint performance with the American School of the Hague. (At the same time, ASL’s other high school musicians—specifically our orchestra and choir groups!—headed to Norfolk and Cardiff, respectively, for their own 2026 Music Tour experiences.)

The Hague, like so many European destinations, has also played host to countless other ASL field trips, including International School Sports Tournament (ISST) athletics competitions, and quite a few Model United Nations conferences, too. Former high school history teacher John Wilson (ASL 1971–2009) was key in championing the School’s Model UN program as soon as he joined ASL, and took many a delegation across the Channel for days-long experiments in international cooperation.

In 1978, as an “alternative” to the Music Tour that high school musicians were, by that point, taking every year, a new tradition was born in the High School: Alternatives. The trips, which quickly became an ASL institution, are generally four days long, and have taken multi-grade groups of students everywhere from Russia to the Canary Islands to Iceland to Cyprus; all across the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, the Balkans—and beyond.

1988 yearbook editors introduced a long spread of Alternatives photos and quips by excerpting a letter sent around the High School that year by Clayton Lewis P ’01 ’03 (ASL 1980–94), the divisional principal at the time, which said that the program had two main goals. The first, Mr. Lewis wrote, was to “enrich the quality of our curricular and extracurricular program by providing a wide range of educational, cultural, and recreational activities.” The second aim of Alternatives was, in his words, “the socialization process, one that brings together seemingly disparate students (new-returning, younger-older, extrovert-introvert) into close and meaningful associations.”

Even beyond the ASL student body, Alternatives—like many other ASL field trips over the decades—have long built bridges and mutual understanding. 

In 1979, the high school yearbook reported, history teacher Steve McCollum (ASL 1975–79) launched an exchange program between ASL and a school in Cologne after speaking with a teacher at the German school that Alternatives travelers had visited the year prior. “In the autumn, the German students visited ASL for a week,” the yearbook reported. “ASL students repaid the compliment by visiting with the Germans, judging that the Germans had been friendlier and more helpful than we had been, perhaps because most of them spoke English and few of us spoke German.”

“As they return from their respective adventures,” high school Principal Lewis continued in the 1988 yearbook, “the barriers that divide or isolate students are to a large degree lifted.”

That same year, the Quoi de Neuf (the former name of the Scroll, ASL’s still-thriving middle school student newspaper) ran a series of articles recapping weeklong middle school trips around the UK and Europe, with groups travelling around Greece—where Grade 6 students toured Athens, Crete, Delphi, and Mycenae, and performed a play by Aristophanes in Epidaurus—as well as Wales, Holland, and Dorset.

This year’s Grade 6 students will pick between trips to Isle of Wight, the Peak District, North Wales, Hadrian’s Wall, and bath, while Grade 5 heads to the English coastal village of Calshot, Grade 7 goes to Dublin, and Grade 8 will take their traditional annual trip to the beaches of Normandy to study WWII history.

Grade 4, preparing to enter middle school, also takes advantage of spring weather with a formative two-night tradition of their own: the whole grade travels to Bushcraft, an outdoor education center in Cambridge where they live and work within trip-specific “tribes,” which mix classes and encourage whole-grade bonding. They sleep outdoors, and learn essential outdoors skills such as outdoor cooking, fire-building, wilderness first aid, and more—while also doing activities like axe-throwing, archery, whittling, and building shelter.

The Bushcraft trip, now approaching 10 years old, replaced Grade 4’s earlier Canada Coombe overnight tradition, and really is “proper camping,” reports Sarah Ong (ASL 1994-present), lower school administrative assistant and trip organizer for the past five years. “It’s dark, and there’s no electricity.” Bushcraft is well loved by students—even if, for many of those heading away from home for the first time, it can inspire some anxiety ahead of time. 

“More than anything, we get a sense of community,” says Grade 4 teacher Elliott Green (ASL 2018-present) of Bushcraft. “It’s a lovely time for students to culminate their time in the Lower School. You see independence, the courage to act, bravery, and kids getting messy—and not taking themselves too seriously.

From double-decker buses in 1950s London to performances in The Hague and nights under the stars in Cambridge, ASL field trips have always been about more than travel. They are about curiosity, connection, and growth—about stepping beyond the classroom and into the wider world. 75 years on, that spirit of movement continues to define an ASL education.