With Britain's universities in dire straits, a radical rethink of how these institutions manifest as physical infrastructure is long overdue, writes Owen Hopkins.

University campuses are bustling once again, studios are hives of activity and lectures are in full swing.

It's a cycle that's been repeating for years, decades, centuries. And this is mirrored in the perennial nature of many of the debates around architecture and higher education.

Even in response to their own stated missions, universities as currently constituted would not be invented today

Is it too detached from the profession? Or is it vital to learn away from the mostly mundane realities of practice? Is architecture a creative discipline or a service industry?

The questions underlying the future of architecture in higher education are much the same as those facing architecture itself – and always have been. But in the UK at least, one big thing has changed in the last few years, and that's the threats universities are now facing not just to business as usual, but to their very existence.

Having bet big on high-fee-paying foreign students to plug funding shortfalls caused by rising costs and real-terms declines in home student income, in recent years universities have been stung by big drop-offs in the numbers of students prepared to come and study abroad. The resultant massive funding gaps at many universities have precipitated hastily conceived reorganisations – code for redundancies.

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But the threats universities are facing arguably run much deeper. It is fair to say that even in response to their own stated missions, universities as currently constituted would not be invented today.

In concept, they remain largely true to their medieval origins, cosplaying as 21st-century organisations infused with management speak. Despite efforts to "reach out" and forge greater links with industry and communities, they frequently still act as closed-off repositories of knowledge, training generations of students for yesterday's economy.

It is a characteristic of all institutions that once they reach a certain size and age, they shed their founding mission and exist simply in order to perpetuate themselves. And so it is with universities, with the transformations instigated by institutions across the country in response to the funding crisis really being about protecting the status quo.

The absence from universities of radical thinking around their future and fundamental purpose is little surprise

Amid all this, the absence from universities of radical thinking around their future and fundamental purpose is little surprise. What is surprising is the lack of comment, let alone ideas, from the architectural world given how the future of universities is an urban and ultimately spatial question.

Universities have long been core to successive governments' policies for regenerating Britain's post-industrial northern cities. In places like Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, even Manchester, universities have been positioned as "anchor institutions" – spurs of economic development, but also and arguably more critically among those cities' largest single employers.

Moreover, the expansion in student numbers during the 2010s has also led to the building of large amounts of student housing, transforming towns and cities up and down the country. If any one of the large urban universities went bust – which is not as unlikely as it seems – the effects for local economies would be disastrous, and arguably even worse than deindustrialisation.

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This conception of universities as fundamentally spatial entities is hardly new, of course, and in particular was at the heart of a project that sought to reimagine the university for the post-industrial age by the iconoclastic architect and thinker, Cedric Price.

Published in 1966, Price's Potteries Thinkbelt project was conceived against the twin backdrop of the Robbins Report of 1963, which led to a massive expansion of higher education, and the country's impending shift from an industrial to a service-based economy, which was already having devastating effects on places like the North Staffordshire potteries – Price's chosen site.

What he proposed was nothing less than the dissolution of the distinctions between universities and places, education and industry, learning and everyday life.

The questions Price sought to address for higher education remain largely unanswered today

At its core, the Potteries Thinkbelt was a spatial proposition, turning the idea of a conventional university campus on its head. Making use of the rail lines that had been decommissioned in Beeching's railway cuts earlier in the decade, it re-conceived the university as a moveable network of modular classrooms, labs, technical centres, libraries, administration and accommodation.

The railway carriage was the basic modular unit, allowing spaces for teaching or research to expand or contract and to be moved around, and in the process, help reinvigorate the newly deindustrialised areas. The result was an anti-institution, a university imagined in a permanent state of flux, fluid and adaptable – and also quick to realise.

Prefiguring how residential development would become central to post-industrial regeneration in the 1980s and 1990s, housing – or "living units" as Price called it – was central to the project. But again, Price did things differently, using student housing not as an opportunity to make a quick buck as it is today, but as an experimental space in which to explore a range of new living patterns and typologies.

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Whatever the model, common to all the units was their integration into the local community rather than existing as separate enclaves.

Ironically, as radical a provocation as it was, the Potteries Thinkbelt was soon superseded by an arguably even more radical idea that was actually implemented, with the founding of the Open University in 1969 as a massively decentralised institution enabled by emerging technology. Price, who was famously suspicious of building if it could be avoided, was no doubt pleased by this development.

But there's a further irony in that, despite the advent of the Open University, the questions Price sought to address for higher education remain largely unanswered today. Meanwhile, the possibility he saw of the UK "becoming an increasingly imbalanced community primarily involved in servicing other countries and providing facilities for hardy historiophile holidaymakers" has more or less come to pass.

Price was firmly of the belief that the questions underlying the provision of education were architectural ones

For all his criticisms of architects, Price was firmly of the belief that the questions underlying the provision of education were architectural ones. But to answer them meant doing architecture in a fundamentally different way, breaking free from convention and self-serving agendas, abandoning the ingrained superficialities of tradition and becoming properly radical. It was a call that, despite Price's provocations and personal charisma, has largely gone unheeded.

Today, the situation is arguably ever more urgent. Amid the rise of AI, economic stagnation, deepening regional disparities and consequent political extremism, the lack of radical thinking from universities is both extraordinary and entirely predictable.

But the same could also be said of architecture, which, has retreated from daring to posit anything approaching the scale, ambition or intellectual clarity of Price's proposition.

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While Price's ideas are undoubtedly specific to a time and place, and his answers are not the ones we need today, the underlying principle of a university as a platform for continuous education, light touch in physical infrastructure, that connects culture and technology, a sense of belonging with economic endeavour, is more important than ever.

But, as Price himself noted, to reinvent higher education in anything like this way requires architecture to reinvent itself too.

Owen Hopkins is an architecture writer, historian and curator. He is the director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University. Previously he was senior curator at Sir John Soane's Museum and architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. He was also part of the curatorial team for the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. He is the author of eight books, including Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain (2017) and Postmodern Architecture: Less is a Bore (2020).

The image is from the Potteries Thinkbelt project by Cedric Price. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, gifted by The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2000.

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