Higher education postcard: summer holidays
This week’s card from Hugh Jones’s postbag is sent to you from the mythical “quiet period in the summer”
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Hugh Jones
Hugh Jones is a freelance HE consultant. You’ll find a daily #HigherEducationPostcard if you follow him on Bluesky
Having a lovely time, wish you were here!
Once upon a time, or so the stories go, universities had a quiet period during the summer when stuff got done. I got told this story back in 1990, and even then it felt like a longing rather than a reality. And it certainly isn’t the case now: higher education is a 53 weeks a year business.
But it must have been true once! The planning for the 1960s universities in the UK included consideration of where students could live, and one advantage of seaside universities like Sussex was that students could fill up capacity in holiday B&Bs which was not needed for tourism during university terms. This is not, of course, how things turned out: and it’s the B&Bs that largely went the way of the flesh.
If your thoughts are turning to the seaside, you might find that there’s a university nearby. If we define seaside as a place with a beach or a pier, then I reckon you’ve got: Brighton, Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Swansea, Aberystwyth, Bangor, and the University of the Highlands and islands. And that’s not counting the university centres which have sprung up – Scarborough for one. I must also have missed some – please correct me in the comments! Surely the east coast has some university seaside towns?
Whatever your plans for the summer, I hope you have a good one. Postcards are taking a break for August – I’ll be back on 8 September. Thanks for reading, and for commenting, and I hope you enjoy reading and looking at them as much as I enjoy sharing them.
[Your editor notes - the Aberystwyth postcard does not appear to show all 443 (as per HESA Estates) buildings. If you know Aber at all I'd love to know more about these!]
