Red Brick universities

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Red Brick originally referred to the six civic British universities that were founded in the industrial cities of England in the Victorian era and achieved university status before World War II. The civic university movement started in 1851 with Owens College, Manchester (now the University of Manchester), which became the founding college of the federal Victoria University in 1880 and attained university status when the federal university was dissolved in 1903.

These universities were distinguished by being non-collegiate institutions that admitted men without reference to religion or background and concentrated on imparting to their students 'real-world' skills, often linked to engineering. In this sense, they owed their heritage to University College London and to the Humboldt University of Berlin, both of which emphasised practical knowledge over the merely academic sort. This focus on the practical also distinguished the red brick universities from the ancient English universities of Oxford and Cambridge and from the newer (although still pre-Victorian) University of Durham, collegiate institutions which concentrated on the liberal arts and imposed religious tests (e.g., assent to the Thirty-Nine Articles) on staff and students. Scotland's ancient universities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St Andrews), were founded on a different basis.

Image:Victoria Building Tower UoL.jpg

The term 'red brick' was coined by a professor of music at the University of Liverpool to describe these civic universities. His reference was inspired by the fact that The Victoria Building at the University of Liverpool (which was designed by Alfred Waterhouse and completed in 1892) is built from a distinctive red pressed brick, with terracotta decorative dressings. On this basis, the University of Liverpool (which was itself originally part of the aforementioned Victoria University together with Owens College in Manchester) can be argued to be the 'original' red brick University.

The six civic universities are:

• University of Birmingham
• University of Bristol
• University of Leeds
• University of Liverpool
• University of Manchester
• University of Sheffield

However, the term in modern usage has become more nebulous. The University of Reading, which was founded in the early 20th century as an extension college of Oxford and became a university in 1926, is often classed as one of the civic universities, and is therefore 'red brick,' as is the Queen's University of Belfast which became a civic university in 1908, having previously been established in 1845 as an university college of the Queen's University, Ireland which was later renamed as Royal Univerisity of Ireland.

University College London itself, and colleges from the 19th and early 20th centuries which later achieved university status in the post-war expansion, are also sometimes described as 'red brick'; this broader designation includes institutions such as the University of Exeter (originally an extension college of Cambridge), the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (originally King's College, Durham), the University of Leicester and the University of Southampton (originally part of the University of London). The University of Dundee in Scotland grew out of University College Dundee, which was founded in the late 19th Century, in a large industrial city, and spent many years as a constituent college of the University of St Andrews. It has many features in common with the redbrick universities of large northern English cities. The term is also sometimes extended to cover the original constituent institutions of the University of Wales (Aberystwyth, Bangor and Cardiff, and St David's College, Lampeter).

See also

• List of British universities
• The 1960s programme of Plate glass universitieszh:红砖大学