This work is one of the first purchased for what is now Loughborough University's campus during Stewart Mason's tenure as Leicestershire's Director of Education (1947–1971). Mason believed that educational environments should be populated with challenging works of contemporary art, and worked closely with a team of advisors and contemporary art galleries to select works. A semi-abstract piece, 'The Spirit of Adventure' brings to mind an aeroplane when viewed from some angles, whilst others are more suggestive of an organic form. On viewing it in 2011, the artist and poet Wayne Burrows ascribed it 'the presence of an artefact from a lost civilisation, part of a modest civic vision of the future whose potential has passed (perhaps only temporarily?) into a history that appears more remote than it actually is.