If the students and faculty, administrators and architects, benefactors and politicians who made modern Britain's civic universities took Oxford and Cambridge as models, it was not always as models to be emulated. The new universities took pride in the things that set them apart from Oxbridge, including their architecture, research, scientific education, and relationship to the locality and region. They adapted ideas and practices from institutions of higher education around the world, especially in Canada and the United States, the British Empire, and Germany. Architecturally, they drew on the “municipal mode of design” as much as collegiate Gothic (168). In the process, civic universities developed “a new sort of architecture: something sui generis” (165). Far from pale imitations of Oxford and Cambridge, by the turn of the twentieth century the civic universities had become the foundation of a new system of higher education, one that would be massively expanded in the century that followed.

William Whyte begins Redbrick by exploring an experiment with higher education at King's College Windsor, an institution founded in New York and then quickly moved to Nova Scotia in the 1780s as part of the loyalist exodus after the American Revolution. Its political and religious orthodoxy endeared the college to the Nova Scotia Assembly, the British crown, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, who collectively gave King's College Windsor tens of thousands of pounds and official status. However, attracting students proved such a problem that in 1829 King's had to drop its requirements that students adhere to the doctrines of the Church of England. The college never flourished, but it did survive, and eventually, after a move to Halifax, it merged with what is now Dalhousie University. The state support for institutions like King's College Windsor from around the British world and the willingness of these institutions to experiment with different religious requirements, physical locations, curriculums, and sources of funding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century prefigured the rise of the University of London and other civic universities.

Above all else, Britain's civic universities were ongoing experiments and compromises. They needed to be able to attract students and cope with continuous cycles of financial shortfalls and windfalls. Consequently, grand ambitions translated into unexpected and messy realities. To raise funding, University College London (UCL) and King's College London technically started out as a joint stock companies. The main quadrangle at UCL was built piecemeal over the course of more than 150 years because of perpetual financial shortfalls. Curricular visions, too, ran up against practical constraints. Many civic universities dreamed of reversing the perceived industrial decline of Britain; however, the strain put on laboratory space by the explosive growth of students, the popularity of the humanities, and the need to provide courses for students on teacher scholarships from the state ultimately created a more diverse curriculum and intellectual culture than first imagined. At the same time, the desire to enhance the sense of community—and the institution's reputation—by having students live on campus was in constant tension with the expense and other logistical challenges of actually providing space for them. Universities that wanted students to live on campus also had to be able to attract large numbers of students from outside the immediate area, which was not always possible. This problem made for substantial variations based on the financial, physical, and geographical constraints. By the 1930s, fully 74 percent of students at Exeter lived on campus while just 10 percent did at Sheffield. Some redbricks had to compromise more than others as they figured out their mission and constituency.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a massive expansion of higher education. The creation of new civic universities and the enlarging of existing ones was part of that expansion. Despite their growth, redbricks continued to primarily serve the middle class. However, by 1967 nearly half of the 379,000 students in higher education were in technical colleges and other alternatives to university, which were much more open to the working classes. Still, redbricks cast a long shadow over this growing sector of the higher education landscape. They “remained the basis of British higher education” and were the model that inspired ambitious polytechnics and led them to become universities after 1992 (278). The relationship of universities and the state also evolved during this time. Universities became ever more dependent on state funding in the postwar period, though they retained substantial autonomy through the 1970s. At the same time, higher education became an important sector of the national economy in its own right and not only as a training ground for new employees and a source of scientific discoveries. From the late 1970s onward, politicians and bureaucrats at the highest levels of the state began to meddle quite actively and publicly in higher education as they sought to enact their economic, social, and political agendas. Though the neoliberal context of their interventions was new, the role of higher education—and especially the civic university model at the sector's heart—as a prominent flashpoint in these broader struggles was not.

Whyte's highly readable study of civic universities fills a significant gap in the history of higher education. One issue I have with the book is the division of its thirteen chapters into six chronologically organized sections, each with its own introduction and conclusion. This structure makes for a choppy read and tends to obscure rather than bring out the threads that run throughout. However, on the whole this is an outstanding book. Histories of education and architecture suffer from a predilection for narrow, insular, and at times desiccated accounts of institutions, policies, and endless iterations on building plans. Redbrick does not suffer from these faults. Rather, it brims with life by meaningfully weaving in the stories of the men and, by the late nineteenth century, the women who attended universities and inhabited their buildings. It transcends the history of education to reveal the central place of civic universities in the evolution of the modern state, the making of the middle class, and the mutual tempering of social radicalism and conservatism.