Cedric Price's 1966 Thinkbelt Returns as UK Universities Face Crisis

British universities are facing threats not just to business as usual but to their very existence, and architecture has offered almost nothing in response, writes Owen Hopkins, director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University, in a new opinion essay for Dezeen.

Published on 1 October 2026, the essay takes Cedric Price's Potteries Thinkbelt project of 1966 as its provocation. Price, Hopkins writes, "sought to reimagine the university for the post-industrial age," and his questions "remain largely unanswered today."

The immediate context is financial. Universities in the UK bet heavily on high-fee-paying foreign students to plug funding shortfalls caused by rising costs and real-terms declines in home student income. In recent years, big drop-offs in international student numbers have opened massive funding gaps, prompting what Hopkins calls "hastily conceived reorganisations – code for redundancies."

The problem runs deeper than funding, Hopkins argues. "Even in response to their own stated missions, universities as currently constituted would not be invented today," he writes. Institutions conceived in the medieval era now "cosplay as 21st-century organisations infused with management speak," acting as closed-off repositories of knowledge while training students for yesterday's economy. Once institutions reach a certain size and age, Hopkins observes, they shed their founding mission and exist simply to perpetuate themselves.

What surprises him is the silence from his own field. The future of universities is "an urban and ultimately spatial question," he writes, yet the architectural world has offered little comment, let alone ideas.

The stakes are urban as well as institutional. Universities have served as "anchor institutions" in successive governments' regeneration policies for post-industrial northern cities such as Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle and Manchester, where they rank among the largest single employers. The expansion in student numbers during the 2010s also produced large volumes of student housing that transformed towns and cities. If a large urban university went bust – "which is not as unlikely as it seems," Hopkins notes – the effects on local economies would be disastrous, arguably worse even than deindustrialisation.

Hopkins traces an alternative lineage back to Price. Conceived against the twin backdrop of the Robbins Report of 1963, which drove a massive expansion of higher education, and Britain's shift from an industrial to a service-based economy, the Potteries Thinkbelt proposed "nothing less than the dissolution of the distinctions between universities and places, education and industry, learning and everyday life."

Built on rail lines decommissioned in Beeching's railway cuts earlier in the decade, the project reimagined the university as a moveable network of modular classrooms, labs, technical centres, libraries, administration and accommodation. The railway carriage served as the basic modular unit, allowing teaching and research spaces to expand, contract and relocate, reinvigorating newly deindustrialised areas such as the North Staffordshire potteries. The result, Hopkins writes, was an anti-institution: a university in permanent flux, fluid, adaptable and quick to realise.

Housing – Price's "living units" – was central, but not as a money-maker. Price used student housing as an experimental space to explore new living patterns and typologies, with all units integrated into the local community rather than existing as separate enclaves.

Ironically, the Thinkbelt was soon superseded by a radical idea that was actually built: the founding of the Open University in 1969 as a massively decentralised institution enabled by emerging technology. Price, famously suspicious of building where it could be avoided, "was no doubt pleased," Hopkins writes. Price's warning that the UK risked "becoming an increasingly imbalanced community primarily involved in servicing other countries and providing facilities for hardy historiophile holidaymakers" has, Hopkins argues, more or less come to pass.

Price believed the questions underlying the provision of education were architectural ones, but answering them meant "breaking free from convention and self-serving agendas, abandoning the ingrained superficialities of tradition and becoming properly radical" – a call that has largely gone unheeded. Today, amid the rise of AI, economic stagnation, deepening regional disparities and political extremism, Hopkins finds the lack of radical thinking from universities "both extraordinary and entirely predictable."

The same, he argues, could be said of architecture itself, which has "retreated from daring to posit anything approaching the scale, ambition or intellectual clarity of Price's proposition." While Price's answers belong to their time, Hopkins concludes, the underlying principle – a university as a light-touch platform for continuous education connecting culture, technology, belonging and economic endeavour – matters more than ever. Reinventing higher education, as Price himself noted, requires architecture to reinvent itself too.

Owen Hopkins is an architecture writer, historian and curator, previously senior curator at Sir John Soane's Museum and architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, and part of the curatorial team for the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.