University of Southampton

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Southampton began with a sum of £103,000 that a man left behind when he died in 1850. Today it is a public research university in Southampton, England, and a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities. Its roots, though, lie in a stranger and much smaller idea than the institution it became. How does one dead man's bequest turn into campuses on the south coast of England, in Malaysia and in India? What happens when a university is built around a public road it cannot move? And how did a place that lost buildings to bombs, fire and a deadly outbreak of disease keep growing? The answers start with a will, and with a wealthy man who did not much like the modern age.

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• 2. Hartley's Will

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  Henry Robinson Hartley, who lived from 1777 to 1850, inherited his money from two generations of successful wine merchants. He was an eccentric who stayed apart from his times and had little affection for the new docks and railways of Southampton. His will told the town to use the interest and proceeds of his gift to "best promote the study and advancement of the sciences of Natural History, Astronomy, Antiquities, Classical and Oriental Literature". He imagined a Public Library, Botanic Gardens and an Observatory, all housed in his property on the High Street.

  Hartley did not want a college for the many, like those appearing in other English industrial towns and commercial ports. He pictured a cultural centre for the town's intellectual elite. Lawyers fought over the bequest for a long time, and the town argued publicly about how to read his words. Some public figures pressed for a more widely accessible college. The Southampton Corporation chose to create the Institute instead.

  On the 15th of October 1862, the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, opened the Hartley Institute. The day was a civic occasion that outshone anything the townspeople could recall. Money was tight in the early years. In 1883 the Institute became the Hartley College, and student numbers rose, teaching staff grew, the facilities expanded and registered lodgings appeared for students. Hartley's name survives today on the Hartley Library at Highfield, which can trace its presence on that campus back to 1914.

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• 3. Huts and Bombs

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  In 1902 the Hartley College became the Hartley University College, a degree-awarding branch of the University of London. A committee inspected its teaching and finances first, and donations came from Council members, including the Treasurer, William Darwin. Rising student numbers pushed fundraisers to look for greenfield land around Back Lane, now called University Road, in the Highfield area. On the 20th of June 1914, Viscount Haldane opened the new site for what was now Southampton University College.

  Six weeks later the First World War began, and no lectures were ever held in the new buildings at that time. The college authorities handed them over for use as a military hospital. Wooden huts went up behind the building to cope with the flood of casualties. After the fighting ended, the War Office donated those huts to the university, in time for the move from the High Street premises in 1920. Highfield Hall, a former country house overlooking Southampton Common, became a hall of residence for women. South Hill and South Stoneham House were acquired to house men.

  The next two decades brought private gifts. The two daughters of Edward Turner Sims, Mary and Margaret, paid for the university library to fulfil a request in his will. The people of Southampton helped fund new buildings on both sides of University Road.

  During the Second World War, the Southampton Blitz dropped bombs on the campus and its halls of residence. The college chose not to evacuate. It expanded its Engineering Department and School of Navigation and set up a new School of Radio Telegraphy. For a period it hosted the Supermarine plans and design team, until further bomb hits in December 1940 sent that team to Hursley House. Halls of residence housed Polish, French and American troops. After the war, Electronics grew under professor Erich Zepler, and the Institute of Sound and Vibration was established. It would still take until 1952 for the college to receive the royal charter that let it award its own degrees.

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• 4. Charter and Crisis

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  On the 29th of April 1952, Queen Elizabeth II granted the University of Southampton a royal charter, the first given to any university during her reign. Six faculties were created: Arts, Science, Engineering, Economics, Education and Law. The Duke of Wellington became Chancellor, and the first Southampton degrees were awarded on the 4th of July 1953.

  Growth followed, shaped by the Robbins Report, which drove student and staff numbers upward over the next couple of decades. In July 1961 the Borough Council approved the purchase of some 200 houses on or near the campus. New faculties and departments appeared, among them Medicine and Oceanography. Sir John Wolfenden, chairman of the University Grants Committee, had discouraged both. Accommodation grew through the 1960s and 1970s, with Chilworth manor acquired and new buildings added at the Glen Eyre and Montefiore complexes.

  In 1987 the University Grants Committee announced funding reductions as part of nationwide cutbacks. A budgets and deficits subcommittee proposed cutting staff numbers to remove the expected losses. Demonstrations broke out on campus, and the university Senate rejected the proposal. It was reworked to reduce the redundancies and spread the cuts differently across faculties.

  In the autumn of 1997 the university faced Britain's worst outbreak of meningitis, and three students died. The response was a mass vaccination programme. Afterwards the university took the ground-breaking step of offering vaccination to every new student. By the time it celebrated its Golden Jubilee on the 22nd of January 2002, research income made up more than half of everything the university earned.

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• 5. Spence's Campus

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  Many of the older Highfield buildings are red brick, including the Hartley Library and the West building of the Students' Union, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. The same architect is famous for the red telephone box and Battersea Power Station, and he designed part of the library's iconic entrance. In 1956, Sir Basil Spence was commissioned to plan the 59 acre campus for the foreseeable future. His plan had to deal with University Road, which cut the site in two, and with the quarry of Sir Sidney Kimber's brickyard, itself divided by a stream.

  Spence could not remove the road or the private houses along it. So he designed many buildings to face away from the road, in contemporary concrete, glass and mosaic. Later buildings ignored his plan, including the Synthetic Chemistry Building and the Mountbatten Building, which was destroyed by fire in 2005. In 1991 a Highfield Planning Group formed under Tim Holt. In 1998 Rick Mather drew a new masterplan, proposing that University Road become a tree-lined boulevard backed by white-rendered buildings. He also contributed the Zepler and Gower Buildings.

  Spence also designed the Nuffield Theatre, which opened in 1963 with a Nuffield Foundation grant of £130,000. Its 480-seat auditorium doubled as the principal lecture theatre. The theatre went into administration in May 2020, and its permanent closure was announced that July.

  The Turner Sims Concert Hall followed in October 1974, after a donation of £30,000 from Margaret Grassam Sims in 1967. The university's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research designed it for music, with a flat floor at the bottom so it could host exams. The John Hansard Gallery opened on the 22nd of September 1980 in a building that had held a tidal model of Southampton Water from 1957 to 1978. In the western half of the campus stand twentieth-century sculptures, including work by Barbara Hepworth.

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• 6. Beyond Highfield

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  In December 1993, the university paid Southampton City Council £2 million for the site of Avenue Campus. Planning rules had reserved the spare land at Highfield for future car parking, so the university needed room elsewhere. The site once held the Southampton Tramsheds and Richard Taunton's College, whose building still stands. Departments moved in during 1996, and a new Archaeology building costing £2.7 million followed in 2006.

  The National Oceanography Centre sits in Southampton Docks, three miles south of the main campus. Planning began in 1989 and took until 1994, partly because of cuts and doubts over whether a national research centre could fit within a university. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, opened it in 1996. It was the base for the research vessel RRS James Cook, and until recently for the RRS Discovery and the RRS Charles Darwin.

  The Winchester School of Art, founded in the 1960s, joined the university in 1996. In 1998 the Textile Conservation Centre moved there from Hampton Court Palace and remained until its closure in 2009. The university's link with Southampton General Hospital began in 1971, when it was the first to house a new school of medicine alongside the universities of Nottingham and Leicester.

  In October 2012 the university opened its first international campus, in Iskandar Puteri in the Malaysian state of Johor. Students on the split degree programmes spend the first two years in Malaysia and the last two at Southampton. The first group graduated in 2016, along with the first PhD graduate. The campus has grown from four Engineering programmes to 20 programmes across Engineering, Business and Computer Science.

  In 2024 Southampton became the first university in the UK to be awarded a licence to open a campus in India. It will sit in Gurugram, in the Delhi National Capital Region, with programmes planned to begin in 2025.

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• 7. Research and Rankings

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  The Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, founded in 1963, won a Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in 2006. Its work covers the noise of aircraft engines, underwater acoustics, the human response to sound and vibration, and the control of structural vibration. Elsewhere on campus, the School of Electronics and Computer Science created EPrints, the first archiving software for publishing research freely on the Web. Institutions around the world now use it.

  Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, is among the academics working at Southampton. Wendy Hall created Microcosm, a predecessor of the Web, and was founding director of the Web Science Trust. David Payne invented the EDFA for fibre optic cables. Under Vice-Chancellor Sir Howard Newby, in the mid-1990s, the university pushed harder on the quality of its research.

  The Chilworth Science Park opened in 1983 and was renamed in 2006. About 50 businesses connected to the university work there. Three of the twelve spin-out companies created since 2000 floated on the Alternative Investment Market, with a combined market capitalisation of £160 million. On the 9th of May 2013, the university joined the Science and Engineering South Consortium alongside Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London and University College London.

  In 2015 the university began fundraising for the Centre for Cancer Immunology at Southampton General Hospital. At the start of 2018 it had raised the £25 million target. In March 2018, 150 scientists moved into the first building of its kind in the UK.

  Rankings tell a mixed story. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, Southampton placed 17th by grade point average and 16th for research power. In 2017 it first received Bronze in the Teaching Excellence Framework, and an appeal was rejected in August 2017. Vice-Chancellor Christopher Snowden called the exercise "devoid of any meaningful assessment of teaching". The university re-entered, won Silver in 2018 and kept it in 2023. In 2020 The Guardian ranked it first in the UK for Civil Engineering and for Electronic and Electrical Engineering.

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• 8. Student Life

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  The Southampton Students' Union supports more than 200 affiliated societies and 80 sports. Four student media outlets operate: Surge Radio, the internet television station SUSUtv, the newspaper Wessex Scene, which comes out once every three weeks, and The Edge. The Edge began in 1995 as an insert in Wessex Scene, then became a full publication with an online presence in 2011.

  Students live in an unusual mix of buildings. South Stoneham House, part of the Wessex Lane Halls, dates from 1708. City Gateway Hall opened in September 2015, with a 15-story elliptical tower housing up to 375 students. It earned a place on the runners-up list of the 2015 Carbuncle Cup. The Glen Eyre complex houses approximately 2,000 students less than half a mile from Highfield. The Unilink bus service connects the campuses, halls and hospitals, and students in university halls receive an annual pass for all of its routes.

  The Jubilee Sports Centre opened in 2004 at a cost of £8.5 million, with a six-lane 25-metre pool. The Wide Lane Sports Ground, covering 73 acres, was refurbished for £4.3 million in 2007. The Southampton Mustangs Baseball Club, founded in 1997, hosted a university tournament from 1998 that invited Oxford, Cambridge, Portsmouth, Royal Holloway and Norwich. It joined the British Baseball Federation's lowest division in 2004 and reached the top-tier National Baseball League for the 2010 season. In national student championships, the university has won in rifle shooting year after year since 2004.

  Study happens in the Hartley Library, which holds just under 1 million printed books. Its earliest volume is the Brescia edition of the Divina Commedia, printed in 1487.

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