York: Punting, alas, is forbidden

“Children are not born stupid – it is the colleges to which their parents send them that make them so” Michel de Montaigne.

The original development of the University of York, in terms of both its architecture and pedagogy, was one of enigmatic restraint. Michael Beloff, who first identified the ‘Plateglass Universities’ in the wake of the higher-education reforming Robbins Report, quotes Harry Rée, the first Professor of Education at York (and former captain in the Special Operations Executive), as saying of the University’s approach: “Let’s be thought of as conservative. Then we can get on with the really exciting things!”

Rée’s alma mater was St John’s College, Cambridge, and the relationship between such a college (those pertaining to the ‘Ancient’ universities) and the Plateglass York, is identified by Beloff: “The cardinal principle [of the University of York] is that in creating new universities one must build on the achievements of the old. It is one well-suited to a university built near a city whose tradition of scholarship goes back to Alcuin in the time of Charlemagne”.

Nowhere was this made clearer in the University’s development than in the establishing of its founding college, Derwent. Opened by Elizabeth II in 1965, the first blocks consisted of student, staff and guest accommodation, the Philosophy and Politics departments, a dining hall and a bar. It was based (how loosely remains a point of debate) on the Oxbridge model of colleges; spaces for living, socialising, and teaching, with the latter being done according to the tutorial model. Derwent was soon followed by Langwith, and their expansion resulted in a perceived overlap, leading to the two being termed ‘Derwith’ in later years. Innocent enough, but York’s colleges were subsequently bestowed with Ancient baggage: Latin mottos, college crests, JCRs, porters’ lodges, the ever-forced public-school inheritance of college rivalry, and, as Beloff notes, “scarves”. While the Robbins Report favoured the college system for its assumed pre-existing communality, which “makes it possible for a non-resident tutor to dine in college and be available outside ‘office hours’ without feeling he is neglecting his wife and family”, its equally reformative impulse would seem to be barely perceptible in such inheritances. There was apparently, however, neither the appetite nor the resources to go the whole hog and embrace the University Challenge-reinforced definition of a ‘true’ collegiate system: one in which at least some proportion of teaching takes place solely within the confines of the college. Such a step would possibly have marked a rending of the fibre of the Report, which “opposes closed academic communities with staff and students forming a kind of world within the world”.

And there were, despite the apologism in approach to the ‘Ancient’ tradition, a slew of what at the time seemed radical reforms. Beloff highlights the absence of ‘high table’ as being of particular note, and relates the opportunity for a debate between Lord James, York’s first vice-chancellor, “about the immorality of breakfast charges…with an anonymous beatnik as they queued together”. Although such once-unsettling happenings might now seem ruly, it cannot be, and is not, said that the architecture of ‘Derwith’ isn’t striking. Five years prior to its listing in 2018, York Vision reported that plans for demolitions were being drawn-up, with plenty of criticism being levelled at its architecture. In its defence, one first year Economics student told the paper: “It’s one of the most ugly buildings I’ve ever seen in my life, but because it’s so grotty, that’s what makes it Derwent. I’ll be sad to see it go”.

While it is markedly so that such “ugly” buildings were the result of the modernizing influence of the Robbins Report, the approach differs from many of the other Plateglass architectures. In the case of Derwent and Langwith, chief architects Sir Stiratt Johnson-Marshall and Sir Andrew Derbyshire placed the emphasis of the college buildings not on a singular visual impression, such as the ziggurats of East Anglia, but instead on a visual consistency, “a serial composition strategy that unifies the different shapes in the composition” (Domingo-Calabuig & Lizondo-Sevilla). This unification strategy was one that, if not intended to usurp the ancien regime, sought to derive from the essence of collegiatism a more purposefully communal environment. As such, the colleges were system-built using the innovative CLASP (Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme) model, developed in 1957 by Nottinghamshire and Hertfordshire County architects Donald Gibson and Charles Aslin. As with any system building, cost and speed were the key tenets of its design, but at York it also allowed for a flexible arrangement of waterside walkways and courtyards, skirting the edge of what was at the time the largest man-made lake in the world.

The lake itself was the work of Frank Clark, the landscape architect of the campus, who had previously acted as the chief landscape consultant for the Festival of Britain site. The real catalyst of bringing the lake into being, however, came in the form of severe drainage problems – Clark decided to expand upon what had previously been a boating pond in order to solve these issues, and in doing so offered a setting which complimented the simple, low-rise blocks of the campus as it was then. The use of such a significant water-feature across the whole site goes beyond a single visual emphasis, and becomes an environmental one. Due to its plastic bottom, “punting, alas, is forbidden”, Beloff laments. No boating of any kind takes place, and as a result the York campus, and Derwent in particular, have become home to an array of waterfowl, which for many students have become key figures of note.

The modular panels which comprise the CLASP building also allowed for the integration of an extensive series of bas-reliefs. A prominent university public art collection is by no means unique, but the scale and integration of the work of artist Fred Millett into the site was. Historic England’s listing of the Derwent buildings and walkways, as well as the designation of the area as a Registered Park and Garden, makes reference to six of these reliefs, but there are in fact many more scattered across the ground level exteriors and interior doorways. Some are in plain view, whilst others remain tucked away in the near-labyrinthine arrangement of buildings. To Pevsner they were “restless and incomprehensible”, neither of which should be read as adjectives of disparagement, but certainly their angular abstraction serves to codify what begins to feel, as one moves through the college, like a deliberate obfuscation of spatial comprehension.

Which is more or less precisely what it was.

In an attempt at communising the space, the buildings were arranged in such a way that clear and direct routes are unavailable to those unfamiliar with the college’s layout. At the same time, the distinct covered walkways seem intended to detract from the possibility of ‘democratising’ desire lines – yet, by way of an architectural hypocrisy, the arrangement of buildings often seems to call for such trespass. Such an exercise in counter-intuition begs the question as to why, in a supposedly progressive educational institution, it would be used at all? Most recently these questions have been quite rightly raised in relation to physical accessibility, in particular with regard to signage.

As well as the deliberate estrangement of the newcomer through spatial design, there was also an intentional absence of helpful signs. Individuals unfamiliar with the college were not given the luxury of being able to immediately know where to go, the theory being that this would force them to stop a more-familiar passer-by and engage them in conversation by asking for directions. This represented a sociability imposed upon the Individual within their everyday environment, which might, it was hoped, lead to their integration within it.

Nowadays, egocentrically, signs have cropped up all over the place. This drastic increase is largely due to the aforementioned campaigning around accessibility, albeit at controversially high cost to the college. As York Vision put it so distinctly: “£52K SPLURGED ON SIGNS”. The advantage of such press attention is that it allowed for the voices of students on the other side of the debate to be heard, including one archaeology student who did Derwent’s Verfremdungseffekt­-expounding architects proud by stating: “Half the fun in going to university is getting lost around campus and finding new things”.

This way of thinking, of envisioning the existence, even responsibility, of the student as one of constant encounter with possibilities, recalls Michel de Certeau’s understanding of movement through ‘everyday’ places; “if it is true that a spatial order organises an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualises some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge”. In his reading of everyday spaces/places, de Certeau, envisions environments as dictatorial and “monolithic”, to be outwitted and undone by the movement through them, evoking a liberational gesture. In the case of Derwent, however, the architecture emerges already in a state of undoneness, pre-prepared for the negotiation of its spaces by a student and staff body whose interpretative efficacy has no doubt been largely guided by the mundanities necessitated by a college space: where they are meeting, where they are eating, where are they sleeping, etc. Thoughts rarely concerning themselves with the High Modernist “interdictions”, often adorned with Fred Millett’s reliefs.

Also included in the 2018 listing was Austin Wright’s Dryad sculpture, which sits squarely in front of Heslington Hall on a square pedestal, separated from the Jacobean Revivalist house by a square pond of which it no doubt represents the guardian. It is one of two sculptures by Wright on the campus, the other being the less traditionally-situated and fully-abstracted untitled work on the ramp which provides access to the library, nicknamed the Avocado. Heslington Hall itself, housing an invisible administrative nexus, seemingly represents the point of officiation for Campus West, as if to justify the entirety of the subsequent ‘eye-sores’ of Derwent and Langwith. Its own handsomeness is complicit in the ‘ye olde’ masquerade of educational establishments having to be more than two hundred years old (which it isn’t). At the same time, it is exactly the sort of building that cannot be found in, say, Cambridge – the majority of the redbrick there having long-been plastered-over by Georgian façades.

Dryad sits seamlessly in place, as if no Modernist form should ever offend a building like Heslington Hall (having replaced a Henry Moore ‘Family Group’ which has since moved on). Dryad’ssitting so seamlessly recalls an explanation of sculptural symbology by the Yugoslav architect and ekistics theorist, Bogdan Bogdanović: “Bronze nymphs worshipping in a ring of glory on a monument enhance the meaning of the ancient figure of an academic hero. Apart from being accidentally humorous, they represent an allegory expressing a high degree of admiration for mathematics, astronomy or poetry… – like any analogy it may be arbitrary, a creation of the imagination, or designed to denote, explain or prove something”. The tasteful Dryad, in the style which Berger would describe as “the officiated abstraction of the West”, manages its classical allusion on the basis of its ‘future-oriented’ form; it acts as a pretender to what might once have been a Baroque, no doubt nude, figure of antiquity, whilst staking a claim to the progressivity of York’s pedagogical impetus.

The siting of the sculpture evidently differs in approach to the architecture of Derwent, and may be read far more closely along the lines of the ‘monolithic’ everyday of de Certeau, and its top-down bestowal of meaning. A cross-pollination of approach is therefore identifiable in the college – one which at once attempts an open-minded approach to communality, while at its fringes the vestiges of the ‘Ancient’ model remain. How else can it be, Beloff argues, when the city’s scholarship dates from “the time of Charlemagne”? (It was another Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who stated that “he who stands for everything stands for nothing”). The Architects’ Journal in 1984 illustrated the success of the campus along similar lines, stating it is “a place that has become an asset to the ancient and noble city of York, so much so that the burghers come to take their picnics in the grounds and generations of young Yorkists are brought to play amid the groves of Academe”. Despite this perceived continuum, however, it is hard to read the architecture of the University of York in these terms. While clearly its founders perceived the new colleges as inheritors of an Ancient past, beyond an occasional sculptural imposition such as Dryad, there is little in the physical spaces themselves which suggest a blind surrender to such a fate. Ultimately it is down to those who inhabit the space, and experience their everyday lives within it, to give it meaning.

Ben Britton is a writer and photographer interested in heritage practices involving 20th century public space. He completed an MPhil in Heritage Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2021.