The University of Essex (a mile or so southwest of Colchester) was established in the early to mid-60’s (so it’s about the same age as UMM*) as one of nine new universities that were created in part to generate new university opportunities in a country where very few young people went on to university.
The University of Essex was born during a rare moment of national hope and enthusiasm in the early 1960s, when everything seemed possible and new departures seemed essential. Only 10 per cent of British school-leavers were going into higher education, which was palpably unjust and, for the sake of the nation’s future, unwise. So it was decided to found and finance nine entirely new universities, of which Essex was to be one (the others were Sussex, Warwick, East Anglia, Kent, Lancaster, York, Ulster and Stirling). — “A personal history of the University of Essex” by Professor Hugh Brogan
Unlike UMM, it was built from scratch, so the architecture is very much 1960’s concrete block stuff. The big block in the right foreground is the library (which I haven’t been in), an to the left is the beginning of the squares which form the bulk of the office/teaching spaces. The squares are hard to describe, and this map doesn’t really do it justice because it doesn’t capture the weird vertical dimension. The computer science department, for example, is in Square 2. Coming from the library end, you sort of feel like you’re on ground level when you enter from the courtyard, but it turns out that you’re on level 4, with three more levels below you. My office is on level 3, so you go down the stairs when you come in, but out my window I look down two floors to a parking area and green space as well as up to a pedistrian bridge that comes from the courtyard level across that green space. I’ll have to try to get some pictures over time that give a sense of how things are laid out.
Riccardo Poli (the fellow I’ll be doing research with) is in Italy visiting family at the moment, and we’re mostly working on getting our housing and school for Sub-Evil Boy sorted out, so not much work yet. Riccardo returns this week, though, and once we’ve got ourselves moved into our apartment and settled, then the sparks should start to fly!
*And about the same age as me, which is weird to think about.
