‘A Hell of a Job’:
Building the University of Leicester
Dr William Whyte, School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester
19th February
On 25 June 1949, the architect T. Shirley Worthington wrote to the Registrar
about progress on what was to become the Percy Gee Building. ‘I have had a quick
look’, he wrote, ‘and think that you have set us a hell of a job’.1 Indeed it was: the
building was a highly complex and confusing prospect, combining, as it was
originally intended to do, and both the arts departments and students’ union. But
Worthington’s complaint was about more than just a single building. The fact was –
the fact is – that building for universities is always a hell of a job. It’s a hell of a job
because the nature of a university makes it so. Universities are not one institution –
they are several. They do not serve one purpose – they serve many. They do not serve
one master – they are beholden to their students, to their staff, their administration, to
their local communities, and to the state, which provides most of their funding. They
are local and national and, of course, increasingly international. Little wonder, then,
that universities across Britain are such a patchwork of different buildings, in different
styles, with different plans, from different periods.
Universities often appear like an architectural palimpsest. Certainly, almost no
universities or colleges in Britain present anything like a complete and coherent
whole. At Birmingham and Bristol, and Leicester and Leeds, and beyond: what we
now see reflects the overlaying of a series of different plans, as each generation
rejects, supersedes, or simply disregards the work of previous builders. As I’ve just
shown in an article on Leeds, for example, the succession of different styles adopted
by the university authorities and their architects – from Alfred Waterhouse’s Gothic,
1
Bursarial Records, Worthington to Registrar (25 June 1949).
1
to Lanchester and Lodge’s neo-classic, to Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Brutalism –
each reflected an attempt to keep up with the times; to build in ways that were frankly
modern and self-assured. Each project involved over-riding, hiding, and even
demolishing previous buildings. What was true at Leeds is also true at most other
British universities.2
The University of Leicester is another case in point. In a generation, it went
through three different master plans. In the 1940s, Thomas Worthington and Son were
brought in to rethink the university precinct. In the mid-1950s, Worthington was
dropped in favour of Leslie Martin, newly appointed professor of architecture at
Cambridge. By the 1960s, however, Martin’s low-rise, low-impact approach was
abandoned, and a series of increasingly enormous towers were erected: Stirling and
Gowan’s iconic Engineering Block; Denys Lasdun’s lumpen Charles Wilson
building; and Ove Arup’s massive Attenborough Tower.
It’s that story that I’m going to try and tell today. The story of how Leicester
built itself into a university. It was, as Worthington said, a hell of a job. In 1921, when
I’ll begin, the little Leicester college opened with nine students and five staff. By
1945, there were just over a hundred students. By the mid 1970s, when I’ll end, there
were about three and a half thousand. It was a hell of a job just housing them. But – as
I’ve already suggested – when universities build, they’re not just thinking about pure
practicality. If they were – if universities were only interested in the sheer logistical
problems of finding places to teach and research – then they’d be no real story to tell.
We’d be housed in anonymous barn-like buildings. In fact – as Leicester itself shows
– there’s much more to it than that.
William Whyte, ‘The Modernist Moment at the University of Leeds, 1957-1977’, Historical Journal
51 (2008), pp. 1-25.
2
2
University buildings are also important symbolically; there are consequently
always aesthetic and ideological aspects to all this, too. Architecture was always
intended to embody the ideal of the university. At Bristol, for example, the Wills
Tower was, as one contemporary put it, intended to ‘remind the beholder of the
majesty of learning’.3 At Nottingham, too, as the vice principal put it in 1928, ‘The
visible beauty’ of their new building was ‘the garment of the intellectual beauty which
it is the aim of the University to disclose’.4 Architecture, then, was always more than
simple housing.
Nor were buildings just a drain on resources – they were also a way of raising
revenue. Philanthropic organisations saw architecture as a suitable way of
memorialising themselves as well as housing the university: hence the support given
to Leeds, for example, by the Clothworkers’ Company in the nineteenth century; and
the support for the University of Wales given by the Drapers’ Company at the start of
the twentieth century. Individual benefactors, too, like Jesse Boot at Nottingham,
were often inclined to fund buildings – particularly if they were named after them –
and much less likely to put money into basic teaching needs.
Thus, when we look at university architecture, we can see a complex mixture
of motives and a rich interweaving of ideas. On the one hand, we have architecture as
practical solution to practical problems. On the other, we have architecture as symbol,
as embodiment of identity and ideals. In most cases, I suspect, architecture was
always both – as in Birmingham at the turn of the twentieth century. Here, when
Joseph Chamberlain defended the expense of Birmingham’s new buildings, he did so
in two strikingly different ways. First, he tried a Ruskinian argument: that good
Roger Gill, ‘The Buildings of the Main Precinct’, in J.G. Macqueen and S.W. Taylor (eds), University
and Community: essays to mark the centenary of the founding of University College, Bristol (Bristol,
1976), pp. 15-28.
4
Frank Granger, Memorials of University College, Nottingham (Nottingham, 1928), pp. 24-25.
3
3
buildings could create good people. ‘The architectural beauty of the University
precincts’ he declared, ‘has an intellectual value not less than that of the intellectual
training and practical skill which the University imparts.’5 Secondly, Chamberlain
took a more mercenary tack, justifying the £25,000 red-brick bell-tower he proposed
to put at the heart of the campus in the following terms: ‘Every railway traveller
passing the tower would ask, “What’s that?”’ he claimed.6 This, he went on, could
only help with fund-raising. ‘Give people something to see, and I will get ... half a
million without delay.’7 And which of these two arguments did Chamberlain believe,
or his audience accept? Perhaps neither; perhaps both. For the architecture of Britain’s
universities was the product of many different interests and many divergent agendas.
Buildings could be personal memorials, or civic monuments, or something else
entirely. Indeed, they were many things to many different people. That, in many
respects is why they worked. It is also precisely why they were important.
University buildings matter, then. They matter because of what they are meant
to do. They matter because of what they are meant to say. That’s why, after all, the
bishop of Leicester’s condemned this place as ‘the godless sister of the three other
Midlands Universities’, in 1962.8 He ignored the nine chaplains of the day; he ignored
the Christian Union, and other student societies; and he focussed only on the absence
of a chapel. It’s why the university was willing to spend millions of pounds on
expensive architects and costly architecture. It’s why the architecture was criticised.
It’s even why buildings get occupied by protesting students. For all these people:
architecture was meaningful. The big question, for the historian, is what did it mean?
That’s what I hope to begin to answer today.
5
The Mermaid 2 (1905-6), Supplement, p. 13.
Quoted in A. P. D. Thomson, ‘The Chamberlain Memorial Tower, University of Birmingham’,
University of Birmingham Historical Journal 4 (1953-4), pp. 167-79, at p. 176.
7
Quoted in Ives, ‘A new campus’, in Ives et al., First Civic University, p. 126.
8
Leicester Mercury 18 Dec. 1962
6
4
FIELDING JOHNSON
The original University College, Leicester, was founded, of course, in a disused
lunatic asylum. It wasn’t alone in that – Liverpool, the archetypal Redbrick university
- had also been founded in a former mental hospital, and the principal originally had
his office in a padded cell. The Fielding Johnson Building – as Leicester’s first home
became known - was a far grander and more impressive affair than Liverpool’s
redundant hospitals buildings. It was also far more permanent. Whilst Liverpool
demolished its first home and built a grand new campus, Leicester simply developed
the existing plant. It did so for two reasons.
In the first place, it’s clear that the sober dignity of this building appealed from
the first. Early students, writing in the first college magazine – The Wave – regretted
the ‘air of faint and apologetic Nonconformity’ they perceived here,9 but also
celebrated the building as ‘A rugged edifice symbolic of our youth.’10 Subsequent
additions in the 1950s reflected the sense that this plain, brick-built structure was the
university – and, of course, in recent years, strikingly similar buildings have been
erected nearby. Jack Simmons in his magisterial history of Leicester wrote: ‘the buffgrey brick of which the University is built – so different from the limestone of
Oxford, the mellowed red-brick of Cambridge, the Portland Stone of Nottingham, the
powerful brick and terracotta of Liverpool. There is the best emblem of its character.
Quiet, undemonstrative, under-emphatic, it is an authentic piece of the English
Midlands.11
9
Wave, Nov 19932, p. 1.
Wave, 11 Nov. 1928, p. 2.
11
Jack Simmons, New University (Leicester, 1958), p. 207.
10
5
In the second place – and above all – the fact that the college continued to use
the Fielding Johnson Building was the result of poverty. The same poverty that led the
university of Southampton to use old Nissan huts for lecture rooms well into the post
war period, with the college refectory housed in a hut with dysentery written over the
door. In the first thirty years of its life, Leicester College was even poorer than this.
Unsupported by government grants; dependent on local authorities, local benefactors,
and local students’ fees, the sort of ambitious building plans proposed by other
colleges were just unrealistic here. In 1927, Leeds began work on a massive,
£350,000 building programme.12 In 1936, Sheffield began raising money for an even
greater, £450,000 project.13 Even the University of London, which had previously
languished in architectural obscurity, found itself able to erect Senate House: built, as
one admirer put it, with ‘the kind of soil pipes that one expects to find in heaven’; and
part of a development initially expected to cost £3 million.14 This was silly money, for
the students of Leicester – and so Fielding Johnson remained the embodiment and the
only home of the college. Even the nurses’ accommodation, erected in the First World
War wasn’t taken down for decades. As late as 1964 there were complaints that arts
and social science staff were still housed in the decaying remains of what had been
intended as temporary buildings.15
POST WAR
Everything changed for Leicester in the aftermath of the Second World War.
On a national scale, the state promised to expand and extend the university sector. In
M. W. Beresford, ‘Red brick and Portland stone: a building history’, in P. H. J. H. Gosden and A. J.
Taylor, Studies in the history of a University1874-1974 (Leeds, 1975), pp. 133-180.
13
SUA, US/CHA/4/11 Building and Endowments Fund (1936-42).
14
H. M. Fletcher, quoted in J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘The Architectural Image’, in F. M. L. Thompson, The
University of London and the World of Learning, 1836-1986 (London, 1990), pp. 1-34, p. 25.
15
ULA/AD/D5/7, Development Plans 1962-66, Report (6 Oct. 1964).
12
6
1945, the government promised that £50 million would be found for new sites and
new buildings alone.16 For the little college in Leicester, this meant receiving the first
ever government grants, and seeing student numbers rise remarkably. The 84
undergraduates of 1944 became 109 in 1945, and 218 in 1946. By 1950, the college
was teaching more than seven hundred students. And they were coming from
increasingly further afield, as national grants created a genuinely national system of
higher education. Whilst half of the students came from within thirty miles of
Leicester in 1946; only one in five did by 1949.
This commitment by the state inspired further support from the city council
and greater ambitions from the college itself. In 1945, it was decided that Leicester
should go for broke – and seek to become a University. This would, they recognised
require lots of money. It would also necessitate many new buildings. A university
whose only home was a disused lunatic asylum was a contradiction in terms. Leicester
needed grander, bigger, and better facilities. It needed to look like a university before
it could become one.
This was widely recognised by the other colleges seeking university status –
places like Exeter and Southampton. The fact that Nottingham – with its grand
Portland Stone campus – achieved university status in 1948 only made the point more
plainly. At Exeter, the principal insisted that ‘The University note must be struck.’
This meant erecting solid and striking new structures – buildings that were built to
last. For as he put it, ‘the frank makeshift is forgivable: but a lapse in permanent at
this stage would nullify the struggle to rise.’17 The result was series of developments
by the local architect Vincent Harris: new laboratories, new hostels, a new library;
16
17
UGC, University Development from 1935 to 1947 (London, 1948), 77.
EUA, UA/26/16/, Senate Minutes (1936-1941), 19 November 1936, p. 2.
7
and so on.18 As this suggests, the ‘university note’ could be struck by a remarkably
wide range of buildings. At Southampton, as the college developed, it too employed a
local architect, R. F. Gutteridge, to build both ‘a library worthy of a University
institution’19 and, more remarkably, ‘a [cricket] pavilion worthy of a University
Institution’.20 The pavilion formed a focus for the college’s playing fields. The library
served a still more important dual role: housing books, and hiding the huts that the
college was forced to use from passers by. Even this, though, was not enough, with
one Southampton student left bitterly complaining ‘How can we achieve a University
atmosphere with a motley collection of buildings better suited to a factory yard?’21
The authorities here at Leicester had three big hurdles to overcome: firstly,
they had to provide accommodation for students; secondly they had to create a
campus that looked like a university; thirdly, they had to ensure that this was a truly
civic university – one that was part of its local community; part of the community that
had sustained it since its foundation.22
Halls of residence, it was clear, were a sine qua non for British universities. As
the National Union of Students put it in the 1940s, ‘A University without hostels is
not a University.’23 In part, this was a purely practical consideration. Halls attracted
students – and without students a university could not pay its way. But these hostels
were also believed to have more intangible effects, too. The great fear of the civic
universities was that they were not true communities; their critics called them ‘nine to
five universities’. And the students of Leicester themselves were aware of this.
18
B. W. Clapp, The University of Exeter: a history (Exeter, 1982), p. 84.
Wessex 2.3 (1933), p. 87.
20
Wessex 2:2 (1932), p. 7.
21
Wessex News, 24 February 1948, p. 3.
22
Minutes 1946-7, Buildings and Sites committee (6 Nov. 1946).
23
NUS, The Challenge to the University, p. 44.
19
8
Writing as early as 1928, undergraduates had complained (and in the most awful
verse):
Our rooms and laboratories are [well] appointed
But one grave thing we lack – we are disjointed,
Our community, though small,
Lacks the communal value of the Cambridge ‘hall’.
We come into College day after day
With nothing compulsory to make us stay.24
Granted money by the state in 1946, Leicester bought Knighton Hall and
Nethercote and announced that it hoped ‘to give the University a dominantly
residential character.’25 These halls – be they purpose built or simply adapted older
houses, were intended to create community. That’s why the new men’s halls were
built on the staircase system, instead of relying on long anonymous corridors.26 It’s
also why the students organised social events between the men’s and women’s halls.
As John Winterburn, a student living in what is now ‘Shirley House’ recalled,
freshers’ week in 1947 was marked by a game in which female students at one hall
sewed patches on the trousers of male students from another hall. All this – it seems –
was intended to foster a truly collegiate, or even university, atmosphere.
The attempt to make the college grounds look like a university campus also
proceeded apace. The city council donated land and the national government –
through the university grants committee or UGC – gave £450,000. This allowed
Leicester to look for a truly national name to build up what would become a national
university. The firm chosen was Thomas Worthington and Son, of Manchester. The
Worthington family was an architectural dynasty. It had built in Oxford and
24
The Wave 11 Nov 1928, pp. 2-3.
AD/A8/2 memo (11 Dec. 1946).
26
Minutes 1947-48, Buildings and Sites committee (11 Dec. 1947).
25
9
Cambridge and Manchester and London. The head of the practice was Hubert
Worthington, Slade lecturer at Oxford, Royal Academician, and member of the Royal
Fine Arts Commission. His nephew, T. Shirley Worthington, was to be most involved
in the work at Leicester, and shared the family’s commitment to solid, sensible,
classical architecture. This was a suitably respectable, suitably high-profile firm. The
Worthingtons quickly drew up plans which would have seen the Fielding Johnson
building massively extended – with a series of symmetrical quadrangles stretching out
beyond the Mayors’ Walk, and up to the war memorial. As it was, that plan proved to
be far too grandiose. But additions were made to the Fielding Johnson Building in the
early 1950s; and the Astley Clarke Building gives some sense of what the
Worthingtons intended.27 Here was a complete master plan: a campus unified by its
use of local bricks, its pared-down classicism; and its low-key approach.
This was also a college – and putative university – with a clear focus on its
place within the city of Leicester. Still reliant, as it was, on local financial support and
on local students, that is scarcely surprising. What is noteworthy, however, was the
repeated insistence by both college authorities and city councillors on the need for the
future University of Leicester to be a truly civic university. Whilst other, comparable
institutions – like Reading, Keele, and the new universities of Kent, Essex, Warwick
and York – headed to out-of-town campuses, and turned their backs on the city,
Leicester was determined to stay within the city boundaries. ‘A civic university’
declared the college council in 1945, ‘must grow up in the heart of the city, alive to its
commercial and industrial needs and taking full advantage of its cultural resources. It
must be readily accessible to the city’.28 ‘A university on the outskirts of the city’ they
repeated in 1946, ‘would stand aloof, self-contained and cloistered, readily accessible
27
David Barker, Leicester University: a history to 1961 (Leicester, 1984), p. 47.
ULA/ADS/D5/1, ‘A Note on Sites and Full Development’ (1950). See also ULA/ADS/D5/1, H.
Percy Gee, Alfred A. Ironside, F. L. Attenborough, ‘The Siting of University College’, 22 Oct. 1946.
28
10
neither to students nor citizens.’29 The Worthingtons’ work was thus seen by everyone
as part of civic as well as of educational improvement. The college hoped it would
‘prove a notable edition [sic.] to the architectural amenities of the city.’30 The city
council hoped that it would ‘become the city’s finest civic building centre’. It would,
declared Alderman C R Keene, ‘bring order out of the present disorder’ in the city as
a whole.31
MASTER PLAN
For almost a decade, then, Worthington and sons tried to turn the college into
a university. They supplied plans for halls of residence; for libraries, and laboratories,
and – in the shape of the Percy Gee Building – for a students’ union. More than that,
they were employed to turn Leicester into civic university: an institution which would
be an ornament to the city, with buildings that would improve the townscape as a
whole. And they did so, by reproducing the forms and the materials of the existing
Leicester College. By providing variations on the theme of the Fielding Johnson
Building. The Worthingtons’ work was strikingly successful. Not only did it provide
accommodation for the college, but it allowed Leicester to bid for university status –
and to get it. But just at that moment – the moment at which the work done by the
Worthingtons seemed to have done its job – they were dropped, replaced by a
younger, more controversial architect.
The question, of course, that needs to be addressed is why? Why should
successful architects be rejected at the moment of their greatest success? The answer
is clear: by the mid-1950s, the Worthingtons seemed old-fashioned. Keen to keep up,
ULA/ADS/D5/1, H. Percy Gee, Alfred A. Ironside, F. L. Attenborough, ‘The Siting of University
College’, 22 Oct. 1946.
30
AD/A8/2 memo (11 Dec. 1946).
31
ULA/ADS/D5/1, Transcript of City Council debate (7 Jan. 1947).
29
11
to advertise itself as a modern – indeed, the most modern – university, Leicester
wanted something simply more contemporary. T. Shirley Worthington, the man
responsible for Percy Gee, was devoutly not an ‘experimental architect’ (as he put it).
Indeed, he attacked modern architecture for being crass, crude, and stupid. ‘One of
this crowd [he wrote in 1954] was advocating that Architects should sink all
personality and all do the same sort of work. Surely this is against all principles of
architecture where personality and individualism have been everything all through the
ages.’32 This was not what the founders of the new university wanted to hear.
A year later Jack Simmons – the professor who had celebrated Leicester’s
low-key grey bricks as ‘Quiet, undemonstrative, under-emphatic, … [as]an authentic
piece of the English Midlands’ – said that he wanted something entirely different. We
need, he wrote, ‘a science building of red brick and glass, with eventually buildings
along the top of the hill in contemporary style … buildings with plain, severe, clean
lines.’ So too, Alderman Keene, who had commended the Worthington plan for
bringing order out of disorder in 1947, asked only eight years later, in 1955, whether
‘a more adventurous architect might be obtained’. Although the principal of the
college said that ‘this might not be desirable for a woman’s hall’, it’s quite clear that
Simmons and Keene spoke for the majority.
Seeking a more modern and more modernist architect, the university turned to
a friendly academic for advice. John Summerson, director of the John Soane museum
in London, was a pioneering architectural historian and a passionate advocate of
modernist architecture. He recommended Leslie Martin, newly appointed professor of
architecture at Cambridge, as the ideal architect. Martin was, quite simply, a
phenomenon. He was almost uniquely able to combine professional practice,
32
Bursuarial Records, Worthington to H. B. Martin (22 Dec. 1954).
12
academic research and public life. As the architectural historian Mark Girouard
comments, he was ‘the most powerful figure in the architectural establishment’; a
man who ‘effortlessly [dealt] out development plans to cities and universities’.33 The
brand new university of Leicester was looking for a big hitter – and in Martin, it had
found its man.
Of course, this adoption of modernism and of a modernist architect was not
confined to Leicester. It was happening all across the country – and was particularly
strongly expressed at British universities. The new universities of Essex, East Anglia,
York, Kent, and Sussex, were to be beacons of modernism, employing the latest
architects to build in the most striking and avant-garde style. The old Redbrick
universities were to be similarly enterprising. Manchester, indeed, grew so much and
built in such modern ways that it became known as ‘an empire on which the concrete
never set.’34 Even in Oxford and Cambridge, reforming dons and modernising
architects erected what they called ‘frankly contemporary’ buildings.35 Leicester’s
switch was just one part of what the Architectural Review called a ‘university building
movement . . . somewhat similar to, and as exciting as, the cathedral building
movement of the early twelfth century’.36
But the work at Leicester is a particularly interesting example of this process,
because here the change of architects and change of styles did not reflect a change of
emphasis or change of ideals. There was continuity here, as well as change. Martin
was employed to make the university look modern – but Leicester’s needs and its
place within the city remained fundamentally unchanged. There was still a need for
halls of residence, still a need for more teaching and research accommodation, and
33
Mark Girouard, Big Jim: the life and work of James Stirling (London, 1998), pp. 103-4.
Quoted in Pullan and Abendstern, Manchester, p. 107.
35
Quoted in Geoffrey Tyack, Modern architecture in an Oxford College: St John’s College, 1945-2005
(Oxford, 2005), p. 23.
36
Editorial, ‘The university in the city’, Architectural Review 136 (1964), pp. 9-11, p. 9.
34
13
still a need to show that Leicester was a truly civic university: a crucial part of city
life. The Worthingtons’ model of creating a series of quadrangles was also still on the
agenda. Martin himself argued that in order to create ‘collegiate atmosphere’, it would
be necessary to ‘create sense of enclosure and a suggestion of the atmosphere of the
quadrangle.’37 This was, then, a repackaging rather than a radical rethinking of
Leicester University.
Martin identified three key points that would drive his master plan at
Leicester:
1. retain view of town from park
2. should preserve importance of war memorial
3. should be built in stages. 38
Martin also resolved that using Leicester bricks would enable the new buildings to
fit their context. The idea was a low-rise campus, in which (as Martin put it): ‘the
character of the University buildings will be created as much by the layout with its
partially enclosed spaces, its descending levels, and its interesting views, as by the
individual buildings themselves.’39 The result was this: something designed to be
contextually sensitive, yet strikingly contemporary; something intended to put the
university on the map, but also to stress the university’s place within the city.
Naturally, not everyone was pleased with this modernist movement. One
student complained in 1966: ‘I cannot possibly believe that you can have a healthy
mind in the great Neo-Urinal Halls of Residence and the Physics and Chemistry
blocks.’40 The opening of Villiers Hall was regretted by another student, complaining
that all these ‘unique designs’ were ‘equally unprepossessing’.41Nor was the work
37
ULA/AD/D5/11/1 Report on the Proposed Layout of Buildings (Jan. 1957).
Bursarial Notes, Leslie Martin, ‘A Proposed layout for the University College of Leicester’ (June
1956).
39
Bursarial Notes, Leslie Martin, letter (March 1957).
40
Edward Teague, ‘The New Tradition’, Ripple, 8 Feb. 1963, p. 3.
41
Ripple, 27 Oct. 1966, p. 3.
38
14
always successful. In 1956, John Summerson had warned the vice chancellor that
‘From long and bitter experience I know that one should never be optimistic about a
building enterprise until the roof is on: then one should celebrate quickly before the
rain begins to come in.’42 His words proved to be prophetic. The Rattray building
subsided; part of the Bennett building roof collapsed; there were other leaks and
problems.43 But Martin’s master plan continued – and increasingly other architects
were called in to contribute; not least the architects’ co-partnership who built the
Chemistry building in 1960-61.
THE 1960s
It was this willingness to involve other architects that led to the really
important buildings of the 1960s: the three towers that represented a complete
abandonment of Martin’s ideas, and a rejection of the approach to architecture that
had dominated Leicester since it was started. In the decade after 1960s, the university
fundamentally left behind the idea of low-key, low-impact, local architecture. Here,
instead was a series of interventions that ignored the war memorial, disregarded the
city, and shunned the grey-buff bricks that had typified and symbolised Leicester for
more than a generation. Had the money been there, there would have been still more
towers: five of them, in fact, striding across the campus, a full and final rejection of
the old approach, the old architecture, and the old idea of the university.
The first of these structures was the Engineering Building, designed by the
pioneering practice of Stirling and Gowan. They were Leslie Martin’s men,
recommended by him – but differing strongly from him. They wanted something
more striking than he had been willing to offer. In 1959, the Registrar wrote to Leslie
42
43
Bursarial Notes, John Summerson letter (19 March 1956).
Bursary Files, Physics Building, 20 March 1974.
15
Martin to say that Stirling and Gowan had been invited to design the new department,
and observing that ‘the Vice Chancellor feels that you should be specially warned that
there may be difficulties ahead!’44 He was right. There were arguments and quarrels,
and the building, rather inevitably, leaked. It was greeted with puzzlement by the local
newspapers: the Evening Mail asked whether it was ‘Functional or Bizarre?’45 The
Leicester Mercury described it as ‘Bizarre…angry…controversial…rubbery and manhating’.46 Students soon knew simply as ‘the shack’.47 But it was also a striking piece
of architecture – nationally, even internationally, important. Covered in all the papers
and journals, and even memorialised on a stamp.48 It was exactly what the ambitious
new university wanted: proof of its innovation, its modernity, its national – and
international – impact.
A few years later, another tower was projected, this time by Denis Lasdun,
architect of UEA.49 The Charles Wilson building was project beset by difficulties. In
the first place, there was never enough money. In the second, the university decided
half-way through to add additional storeys. Thirdly, the contractors were slow and
often incompetent. Finally, the university’s relationship was Lasdun was also difficult
– not least because he made sudden and important changes without any consultation.
But, again, the end result was remarkable. It was not always popular – but it was
striking, another assertive symbol of the modern, modernist, and nationally ambitious
university.
Nor did it undermine Leicester’s enthusiasm for large-scale, high-profile
architecture. Not only was there the Adrian Building, opened in 1968; but – still more
44
Uncat. Material on Engineering Building, letter to Leslie Martin (31 July 1959).
Evening Mail, 2 April 1963.
46
Leicester Mercury, 2 April 1963.
47
Leicester Mercury, 21 Jan. 1964.
48
Uncat. material on Engineering Building, Barbara Parker, letter (16 Dec. 1965).
49
Bursarial Files, Charles Wilson Building (3 March 1961).
45
16
strikingly – Ove Arup was called into erect yet another tower. The Attenborough
Building was mocked by students – looking at its scale and size, observing its profile
and bearing in mind its name, ‘should it be called “Dick”?’ they asked.50 But with its
rugged exterior, its paternoster lift (that quintessential symbol of 60s architectural
chic), and its vertiginous height, it was yet another self-conscious attempt to draw
attention to the university, both in the city and (more importantly) beyond.
Why was it that Leicester built these structures and created the skyline we now
know today? Why did the 1960s see the abandonment of the low-rise, local brick
buildings that had characterised the campus since before the 1920s? There are, I think,
three reasons. In the first place, just like the university’s abandonment of Worthington
and employment of Martin, this was simply an attempt to keep up with the times. In
the second place, just like Worthington and Martin, these towers were considered
responses to the practical needs of the university. As it expanded, so it had to build
upwards. There was simply nowhere else to go. Thirdly – and most importantly –
what this change of architects reflected was a change in the idea of the university. In
the 1940s and 1950s, Leicester saw itself as a civic university, as a central part of the
city – part of city life and part of the cityscape. By the 1960s, Leicester’s ambitions
were far greater. This was now a national university with international competitors.
This was now an institution that now educated thousands rather than hundreds, and its
students were drawn here from all over the country. Its funding came almost
exclusively from national government. Its sights were set well beyond the city and the
county. The university was no longer being planned as part of the town – in fact, it
was being planned as a town in its own right.
50
Ripple, 30 Oct. 1969, p. 5.
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CONCLUSION
In just a few years, then, Leicester university had been transformed. It had
begun life as a small college, housed in a disused lunatic asylum, but had become a
national institution, with a campus that could compare with universities throughout
the land. It had employed some of the most high profile architects in the world to
construct some of the tallest buildings in the city, and the most important projects in
the country. The repeated changes of mind and changes of architect may not have
conduced to a coherent plan, but they had certainly allowed the university to keep up
with the times and to keep up with its competitors. By 1970, when the Attenborough
tower was finally ready for use, Leicester looked like the truly modern university that
it had become.
Of course there were losses as well as gains. As Leicester grew, its
architecture shows it growing away from the city that founded it. No longer solely a
civic university, the tall towers of Leicester reflect the way in which it turned its back
on the urban landscape and stopped trying to create a civic space. The massive
increase in residential accommodation likewise reflected the way in which the
university looked beyond Leicester and Leicestershire – beyond the people the college
had been originally founded to serve – in order to attract students from all over the
country and, indeed, from all over the world.
Not everybody liked the end result either. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s and
1960s, people endlessly attacked the architecture that was being built. The
Worthingtons were too old-fashioned, claimed some. Martin was too bland, claimed
others. Stirling and Gowan were too controversial, too bizarre, claimed still more.
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Lasdun was too wilful; Arup was too lumpen. One banal conclusion that we can reach
is this: don’t become an architect if you want to be universally liked.
But we can also go further than that. The architecture of the University of
Leicester shows us two things. Firstly, it shows us the way in which buildings change
as the needs of their inhabitants change. This is perhaps obvious – but it does need to
be noted. As Leicester grew, so its campus changed. In order to become a university,
it had to look like a university; it had to acquire the facilities and the ethos that only
suitable university architecture could inspire. Secondly, and more importantly, the
architectural history of the university shows us the function of buildings is not just
purely practical. The shift from the Worthingtons to Martin was not inspired by a
change of policy, rather it reflected continuity: a desire to keep up with the times. The
university was fulfilling the same function – but simply needed a different, and more
ostentatiously up-to-date form. Likewise, the three towers Leicester built in the 1960s
were not just there to provide teaching rooms, an engineering department, and a social
centre: they also symbolised – demonstrated – the way in which the university now
looked beyond the city which founded it; beyond the city to a broader, national and
international role. Little wonder that this was often controversial. Little wonder that
it’s still a matter of debate today. Architects are right still to see building the
university in the same way as Worthington did. It was, and is, and no doubt forever
will be: a hell of a job.
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