Redbricks and mortar: accommodating students in the civic universities

Professor Sue Heath, Levershulme Research Fellowship 2025-26

This Fellowship is the culmination of four years of archival research on the social and cultural history of student housing in the English ‘redbrick’ universities.

Despite the centrality of housing to the overall student experience, its historical significance is surprisingly under-researched, and is rarely considered in light of the increasingly diverse backgrounds and needs of successive generations of redbrick students.

Accordingly, the research has explored how students’ living arrangements and the obligation of universities to meet their housing needs have shifted and changed in parallel with the changing nature of access to HE in the decades since World War II, as well as the changing nature of post-war youth and processes of growing up.

It has also explored how student housing has impacted upon local communities and the housing opportunities of non-students. The Fellowship will result in a monograph, to be published by Manchester University Press in early 2027.