I was going through newspaper archives (researching the London restaurant boom of the late 1980s, if you really want to know), when I stumbled upon a double-page spread I wrote for The Times in 1994 on Britain’s university cities. I did have a paper copy, long since lost, so hadn’t read it for decades.
I had been working at The Times, having failed to secure a place on their graduate programme, researching its Good Universities Guide league tables, and ringing round universities to find out what spare places they had in clearing (to ‘spoil’ the official clearing deal agreed between UCAS and The Independent). I think they let me write this piece as a treat. (I remember being swollen with pride when The Times’ terrifying chief subeditor told me it had needed very little work. “You write like a sub,” he said. My boss, John O’Leary, looked at me sorrowfully: “The trouble is, you think that’s a compliment, don’t you?”)
The tone is cringe and patronising in places, but I was 23 and had just graduated from a university that specialised in affectless snydery (or maybe that was just me and my friends). I don’t think I had even visited most of the towns and cities profiled, so my write-ups were derived from a mixture of received opinion, cheap one-liners, and I seem to remember some desultory ‘research’ phone-calls to student unions.
All that said, it’s an interesting flashback to thirty years ago, when the ‘binary line’ between universities and polytechnics had just been abolished: the piece deliberately looks at the ‘two uni’ towns and cities as places for students, rather than at the institutions themselves. One or two sentences even made me smile.
Richard Brown 