Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain's Civic Universities

In the last two centuries Britain has experienced a revolution in higher education, with the number of students rising from a few hundred to several million. Yet the institutions that drove – and still drive – this change have been all but ignored by historians. Drawing on decade’s research, and based on work in dozens of archives, some of them used for the very first time, this is the first full-scale study of the civic universities for more than 50 years. Tracing their story from the 1780s until the 2010s, it is an ambitious attempt to write the Redbrick revolution back into history. This book argues that these institutions created a distinctive and influential conception of the university – something that was embodied in their architecture and in expressed in the lives of their students and staff. It was this model that would shape their successors founded in the twentieth century, ensuring that the normal university experience in Britain is a Redbrick one. Using a vast range of previously untapped sources, Redbrick is not just a new history, but a new sort of university history: one that seeks to rescue the social and architectural aspects of education from the disregard of previous scholars, and thus provide the richest possible account of university life.