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 modern term refers roughly to the members of the Russell group founded between 1850 and 1960.

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.

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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 (St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh), were founded on a different basis.

The term 'red brick' was first coined by a professor of Spanish (Edgar Allison Peers) at the University of Liverpool to describe these civic universities (under the pseudonym 'Bruce Truscot' in his 1943 book 'Redbrick University'). 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. With the Birmingham University Act receiving assent on 24th May 1900, the first red brick university to receive its Royal Charter was the University of Birmingham.

The six civic universities are:

However, the term in modern usage has become more nebulous. The University of Reading, founded in the late 19th century as an extension college of Oxford, was the UK's only academic establishment to be granted university status during the inter-war period, receiving its charter in 1926. Despite being the first university to be based on a self-contained campus, Reading is often classed as one of the civic universities and is therefore 'red brick,' as is Queen's University 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 University of Ireland.

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University College London itself, and colleges from the 19th and early 20th centuries which later achieved university status prior to 1963, are also sometimes described as 'red brick'; this broader designation includes institutions such as the University of Exeter (originally an extension college of Cambridge), Newcastle University (originally King's College, Durham), and the Universities of Hull, Leicester, Nottingham and Southampton (until the 1950s, all were colleges with degrees being awarded by the University of London). The University of Dundee 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 extended to cover the original constituent institutions of the University of Wales (Aberystwyth, Bangor, Swansea and Cardiff) and St David's College, Lampeter (originally independent, but now part of the University of Wales).

Keble College, Oxford is notable for being a red-brick style institution within the University of Oxford, which places a similarly strong emphasis on engineering and sciences.

In 1963, the Robbins Report recommended expansion of the British university system, and the universities established after this report are often known as the "plate glass universities".