Pretty towns with universities

[hermanmunster]

Nottingham and Birmingham both have attractive campuses but in each case the rest of the city is just a big city .

For towns / cities that are small enough to wander around with the uni fairly central then Durham, Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh. Can even have a paddle on the beach in St Andrews

[Amber]

If you were picking a university purely on location and not on course (I know this is not realistic but humour me) and your criteria were that you didn't want to go to a big city and preferred smaller (ideally attractive) towns/cities - where would you think of?
I have come up with York, Bath, Warwick, Southampton, Cambridge, Durham, Oxford, Exeter and maybe Bristol and Nottingham (I don't even really know how big they are!) but I'm sure I'm missing loads. Where am I forgetting?

Newcastle! I would definitely say that is the very best place to go to university in the entire country. But yes it is big I guess.

Warwick university is not in Warwick, it is on the outskirts of Coventry. I can say with some authority having grown up there that Coventry is not pretty. And the last time I was there (3 years ago) it wasn't nice to wander round either. Though Warwick and Leamington are.

... and Gloucester- though where the uni is in comparison to the city I don't know,

That is the first time I have ever heard Gloucester called pretty, doodles. (Though there has been some good work done round the docks area which is now nice, before I offend anyone). The university is actually in Cheltenham anyway!

Can even have a paddle on the beach in St Andrews

It is indeed a lovely lovely place. It is also very remote!

I agree about Exeter - the campus has to be the prettiest, and is certainly the greenest.

Lancaster is one you haven't mentioned. The campus is lovely and the town is small and pretty and it is handy for the Lake District. I see it is steadily climbing up the rankings. It is also the very devil to get to on the M6!

[solimum]

Aberystwyth is a delightful small coastal town with a good university - from memory it has about the largest proportion of students to "normal" population of anywhere in the UK. And astonishingly there are direct trains from Birmingham!

Warwick Uni as several others have said is nowhere near the historic town of Warwick nor its castle |(nor its railway station - unwary visitors beware !) : it is actually on the outskirts of Coventry . However Kenilworth (which is also a charming small town with a castle) is nearby and (I think) houses a proportion of the Warwick students

Leicester has a surprising amount of history (Richard III anyone?) and the city centre has been redeveloped relatively recently. The campus is close to the centre and near a large park: first years tend to live in a leafy suburb. Certainly not quiet though!

Lincoln perhaps? Long way from anywhere... Edinburgh? Or St Andrews?

Cardiff (where my DD is now doing a PhD) is a smaller city with a fine historic core, plenty of parks, plus the redeveloped Bay area. Plus the chance to spot the Casualty actors on their lunch breaks!

Worcester is another very attractive cathedral city/small town with a "new" university - at its best when not flooded by the Severn....

Canterbury is where I grew up, dimly aware of the University of Kent on the hill. Now there's also Christchurch too. Lots of tourists!

[supermummy]

Agree with all of the above. Would add Royal Holloway to the list. Although part of University of London actually has a lovely safe campus in Egham Surrey - best of both!

[Daogroupie]

I have spent a lot of time in University towns in the past few years and I have liked them all for different reasons.

Dd1 after spending a week on a course at a Campus University was adamant that she wanted a town University. Personally I do prefer the town universities and some of them are very attractive: St Andrews (where I went so I know it well) Durham and Oxbridge all spring to mind. But I also love the Royal Holloway campus which is close enough to the local towns to have the best of both worlds. I also really like UCL which is its own campus within London.

The reason these events open to secondary schools students are held are to attract the student to the university. Though it can backfire. Dd1 went on a long car journey to an event at a large town University and hated it. I find it surprising that some of my dd's friends have not invested the time to investigate the options. Train tickets can be bought very cheaply in advance.

The course is without question the most important thing and a dynamic lecturer in a 60s concrete building would be far better than a subject that does not enthral you in a lecture in a pretty little town.

I had a great course in a lovely town but would have given up the lovely town for a great course elsewhere if it had interested me more. I know of students who were very location focused and are not finding their courses very interesting. DG

[Amber]

I also really like UCL which is its own campus within London.

Well sort of...it is basically off the Euston Road and incredibly busy and noisy with buildings sprawling all around Gower Street and bits of Bloomsbury. I don't think it has much of a campus feel about it myself. And of course London students end up commuting for hours from far flung places where they can afford to rent, which doesn't foster feelings of belonging.

Dd1 after spending a week on a course at a Campus University was adamant that she wanted a town University.

My DD was the same. She doesn't like the 'artificial' feeling of campus universities removed from their towns and prefers to feel she is part of 'normal life'. She spent a week at Nottingham university in y12 and was craving freedom when she got back - said it all felt too enclosed and artificial - this was exacerbated by the fact the windows in the halls had been bolted down and wouldn't open! I think maybe younger students going straight from school to university may like the safety of a campus, but after a gap year or two I think perhaps the need to feel like an adult not a student starts to kick in a bit.

[KB]

I had a friend at Royal Holloway years ago and they had rooms literally one floor up from the lecture rooms - very handy at 9am Imagine things have changed a bit now. Location still lovely.

Oxford and Cambridge architecture is very different - maybe Cambridge is 'prettier' but Oxford is perhaps more 'beautiful'.

The balance between course and environment is tricky. The architecture is one thing but living somewhere you don't feel comfortable can be a 'deal breaker'. Two of my DCs wouldn't have coped with London for UG - even though UCL has a great reputation for their area of study. One of them went to a slightly less well thought of uni instead. Another one had to get out of UG student accommodation on a big campus or would have left in the first term (not just a drama queen!)

Obviously I would have liked them all to go to pretty towns with scenic walks, good resteraunts and beautiful hotels

[streathammum]

I went to UCL (although quite a few years ago ) and it does have a pretty quad off Gower Street, but most of the faculty buildings are scattered around the area so the feel isn't particularly cohesive. I was in student halls in Camden in my first and last years, which were fine, but the middle year I was in a total hovel in Manor House (don't know how the rats and cockroaches put up with it, given there was no central heating - maybe they liked the fumes that vented into our kitchen from the kebab shop underneath?), and I can't imagine things have got much easier on the London property front in the last 20 years.

My DH would put in a strong vote for Durham.

[anotherdad]

University of Kent, Canterbury. I went there many years ago and it's still one of the more attractive campuses, with lovely views over the city. Canterbury itself is a beautiful city and I felt very at home there and still miss it, decades later. Taking my daughter around over the last year, Bath and Exeter stood out for me. The architecture of the campus buildings at all three I've mentioned is mixed and in many cases, unattractive, but it's the leafiness of the campuses combined with their positions on hills above older, smaller cities that makes them attractive to me. It means that as a fresher you have the relative security of campus life as a base whilst you settle down and then in the second and third years you have a nice city in which to live. What surprised me was how quickly I considered Canterbury to be "home". Within a few weeks of starting there, although I'd come back to Bucks every other weekend, I considered myself to be "going home" on the train on Sunday night. Getting off the train late on a Sunday and seeing the cathedral all lit up felt to me like being back at home. I rarely came back to Bucks during term time for the rest of my three years. Some of that feeling was down to the independence, the friends I'd made and so on but the niceness of the location was a factor, too. I can't imagine I would have felt the same had I gone to UCL, which was another option.

[solimum]

That's a key point to remember - wherever DC go to university there is a strong probability (? no idea of a % - but several of DDs friends are still in Manchester ) of them staying there afterwards for some years because it will feel like "home". So always worth a steer towards places you might like to retire near to be close to your future grandchildren