This superb book is the first history to cover the history of British civic universities in 50 years. The title Redbrick, with its evocation of the kind of institution fictionalized by David Lodge as Rummidge, might suggest a limited Victorian focus, but the book has a more expansive timeframe. It covers institutions made out of the eponymous red bricks, but also civic universities from other periods and in different materials, ranging from Greek Revival plaster to megastructural concrete; a whistle-stop tour from UCL to de Montfort.
The story starts with decades of growing consensus and faltering steps, leading up to the foundation of University College London. From here on, there was a steady stream of new foundations, each drawing on common sources of inspiration, but also reflecting the particular ambitions of their period. The book could easily have been a celebratory litany of foundation dates and worthy milestones but the texture of Whyte's narrative is much more interesting.
The book's epigraph, from a poem by John Masefield delivered at Sheffield University in 1946, reads ‘There are few earthly things as beautiful as a university.’ Whyte is apt to puncture and deflate such grandiloquent claims made for universities, juxtaposing the idealistic rhetoric of administrators with tales of bumbling incompetence, errant students and leaking roofs. The effect is often very funny. Whyte draws on a formidable array of archival research, discovering piquant quotes from a range of obscure sources, encompassing student newspapers, such as Nottingham University's marvellously named Gongster, as well as university minute books documenting wrangles over everything from new halls of residences to academical dress. Although Whyte's wry style occasionally risks coming across as donnishly supercilious, the portrait of Britain's civic universities that emerges is, in the end, one that is almost ‘beautiful’ because it is a human portrait rather than an institutional one. Throughout, Whyte is appealingly unsanctimonious, even when dealing with such material as Glasgow University Student Union's Thursday lunchtime pornographic film screenings, a practice remarkably only discontinued in 1984.
The book will obviously be of interest to those specializing in the history of education. However, the book's methodology, which is cogently set out in the introduction, should be read by all scholars thinking about how to write histories of the way societies interact with the physical environments that they occupy. A centrepiece of what Whyte terms ‘social architectural history’ is that he pays attention to a building's ‘use and reuse’, and the ways in which architecture is ‘reinterpreted and reshaped’ by those who inhabit it.
In paying as much attention to the judgments on buildings by those who used them as to the elite ideas of patrons and architects who gave them form, Whyte is refreshingly unhierarchical. One thing which emerges is that the kind of caustic epithets commonly levelled at the buildings of the sixties (UEA was like ‘Auschwitz with carpets’ being a particularly crass example) are part of a long, perhaps even cyclical, tradition of denigrating the architecture of the recent past. It might subsequently be argued that some opinions on buildings do actually offer more insight than others. Therefore, although Whyte offers a corrective to an important lacuna in the way scholars write about architecture, it is an approach that complements rather than supersedes the traditional focuses of architectural history. To make this point through an example, the story of how in the early 1960s Albert Sloman and his architect Kenneth Capon trudged the fields of Essex discussing how to give form to an educational ideal, knocking up a model in Lego, is surely as historically suggestive as the fact that students voted to name one of the resulting tower blocks after Kafka. Only the second story appears here.
An epilogue brings the story from 1997 up to the present day. Many readers will find Whyte disappointingly sanguine when he insists that the present feeling of crisis in higher education ought to be taken with a pinch of salt, as there has been a near omnipresent mood of catastrophe throughout university history. The book is far from being uncritical though. As Whyte often highlights, the most serious blemish on the record of Britain's universities, despite their ever-widening pool of students, is that they have been consistently ineffective as tools for creating a more egalitarian society. It is here that Whyte's vital and generous history gives the clearest indication of what the remaining task of Britain's universities should be.
