Taking stock of ‘the student explosion’, 1966

A new cohort of school-leavers contemplate their options this month, many of which are available thanks to the 1960s university boom that reshaped British higher education. In 1966, a year when eight new universities were created, the Observer investigated two facets of that ‘student explosion’.

First was a day in the life of University of Essex student Jenny Simms, starting on the Clacton bus and ending playing bridge, but also ‘loud pop music’ in the rambling Victorian mansion she shared with other students. It was Simms’s second year of a Comparative Studies degree and the university’s second year of existence. The student population totalled an intimate 410 (today there are 13,000 undergrads).

‘I hated it at first,’ said Simms. ‘I wanted to be part of a big, impersonal mass.’ Now, though, she shared the collective nostalgia for the first year’s ‘country-club atmosphere’. The campus was a work in progress: the library was three Nissen huts, there was only one purpose-built hall of residence and ‘the students have to live and work surrounded by building site and mud,’ the article explained. ‘There’s never any quiet,’ Simms complained, but there were compensations: ‘The freedom is marvellous.’

With its diplomas poised to gain degree status, the Royal College of Art had less to prove. Alumni had already won over the likes of the Ministry of Transport (road sign design), Coventry Cathedral (stained glass) and London Transport (the Victoria line). The fine art department had incubated the whole Pop Art phenomenon (‘to the bewilderment of some of the staff’) and the ‘flamboyant and publicity conscious’, fashion department was on a mission to ‘pull the English trade out of dreariness’.

Various famous RCA alumni got a namecheck – Peter Blake, David Hockney, Bridget Riley – but there’s another lurking in a pic of the painting school, back to camera in front of a canvas painted with SPIV in block letters. The caption reads ‘Third-year student Ian Dury, pictured on the left working on his “spiv”.’