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"This is the second city of England", wrote Camden, the historian.
"The fairest of all the North parts. A pleasant place, large and stately,
well-fortified. Beautifully adorned as well with private as public buildings.
Rich, populous and to the greater dignity thereto, it hath an archiepiscopal See."
♪ [music] ♪
Even in Roman times, the importance of this site, central to the north
of Britain, commanding a wide plain, was quickly recognised.
One can still see the foundations of the Roman fortress which
covered 50 acres, the first of the great building works of York. York flourished in
the Dark Ages. The first church on this site was built in 627
by King Edward of Northumbria, a church of wood later enclosed in a larger
structure of stone. And soon after was the Minster Song School was founded
and the Grammar School of St. Peters, which later,
under the Yorkshireman Alcuin,
became one of the great centers of European learning.
And this pattern of intellectual and religious growth
persisted through the Middle Ages. St. Anthony's Hall was founded in 1446 and
St. William's College for the Chantry Priests of the Minster in 1461.
Materially too, York flourished.
It was a key town of the North, the center of the great Yorkshire
wool trade, with 9 guildhalls, 17 hospitals, 40 parish churches, a Great
Benedictine Abbey all defined and protected by Norman walling and centered on
the ever grander Minster. Building continued in the 16th century but the
reformation and the decline of the wool trade were two terrible blows and although
nominally important, York's status fell to that of any provincial town.
In the 17th century, two petitions for the foundations of a university were
quietly shelved. Its pretentions curbed, the city resigned itself
to a placid country elegance, to a world of gentry and
assembly rooms, with sentimentality replacing the old vitality of the
merchants. In the 19th century, York revived and the cry for a university was
taken up again, but it was still not until 1960 that York obtained approval for its
university. Anticipating this, a number of buildings had been taken over.
St. Anthony's Hall for the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, a disused
church, St. Johns, for the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, and
the King's Manor, once headquarters of the President of Henry XIII's council
of the North. This was converted and modernized to provide teaching
accommodation, a library, dining and common rooms
for some of the university's first students.
But, it was here, in the grounds of the Elizabethan Hall at Heslington,
on the southeast side of the city, a mile from the Minster,
that the new university was to be centered.
Architects and administrators worked in close cooperation to evolve a complex of
buildings, which should be concentrated, yet not introverted, centralized but not
isolationist. The first job was to drain the severely waterlogged site.
The water was finally channeled into an artificial lake that will in time be a
central feature of the university, a pleasant show of deference
to traditional English landscaping. At last, in wet, cold March, the
site, drained and leveled, was ready for the builders.
- We were just waiting for the word to move. Our administration team
was ready, complete with offices, a small village of people trained to work
together. A construction manager, four site managers, a team of surveyors, a
planning group. The architects, Robert Matthew, Johnson Marshall and partners had
an office nearby and a representative there all the time and main
sub-contractors moved in supervisors and offices for them. This was a great thing,
it meant that we could all work closely together to iron-out any problems as they
arose or, better still, before they arose. This was important because time was the
big enemy. We had only 18 months and we had to finish on schedule. If we didn't it
could mean a thousand students waiting to enroll at a university that hadn't opened.
Mainly because of the time problem, the architects had based the designs on an
industrialized system of building, the CLASP system. This British system was
evolved for educational projects although, it had never been used as big as
a university. As builders, it suited us anyway because we'd already used it for
many schools in Yorkshire and we knew how to handle it.
But, the press of time and this way of building meant there could be no slips.
Even things like drainage pipes had to be in exactly the right place in the
concrete, long before the start on the buildings. It meant the surveyors had to
know exactly what they were doing.
And the same applied to positioning the pins on which the steel frames
of the buildings would rest.
There's a tolerance of plus or minus a 16th of an inch.
That's not much.
The CLASP system is basically a lot of standard steel units which bolt together
to form the frame of a building. Timber floors, precast concrete panels
on the outside and pre-moulded partitions inside, all made in factories
in other parts of Britain and brought by lorry to Heslington for assembly.
This made for rapid construction and a saving in manpower,
important because of an acute shortage of men. Building a university is a very
complicated project of course. It meant we had a lot of subcontractors on site who
were doing a lot of very specialized work. Putting in glass drainage pipes for
chemical waste from the laboratories, for instance. Weekly planning meetings were a
big help here. It meant we could organise things so that nobody got in anyone else's
way. And when there were drains and heating and electricity all going into a
small floor cavity, all being put in by different firms, there could have been
problems.
♪[music]♪
This duct, threading its way through the university, was constructed to carry
closed circuit television, electrical, hot and cold water and other services
to the laboratories and colleges which were being built and which were planned
for the future.
Summer, and by now, things were speeding up.
This was where our planning people really came into their own.
The amount of traffic on the site was increasing and every load of
material, like the skylights for the laboratory blocks, had to arrive at
exactly the right time and end up in exactly the right place. This wasn't just
a matter of traffic control, it meant we had to work in very close conjunction
with our suppliers.
♪[music]♪
The planners had to predict how much material we were going to need as well.
With a £2 million contract where, for example, miles of boarding were being
used, to have been only a few percent out would have meant wastage
of money or time.
When it came to cladding the walls, the organisation had to be even more
precise. For a time, we were taking nearly 90% of the output of these precast
concrete units being made for the whole of the country. They flowed almost in a
continuous stream from the production line in the factory to the site. Each panel was
numbered, so we knew from our plans exactly where it was to go. This was where
it helped us to have had experienced of working at speed. Problems had to be
coped with in a fraction of the time needed for conventional building.
Unless planning is really accurate, an operation like this can end in confusion.
♪ [music] ♪
As easily as these buildings are assembled, so can they be taken apart.
Knowledge is growing all the time, so the colleges and the laboratories will have to
expand and change.
♪ [ music] ♪
The bright, but not always dry, days of summer sped by.
♪ [ music] ♪
With autumn's passing, all the buildings stood.
Winter and 12 months gone, we were still on schedule.
♪ [music] ♪
By now, we had waterproof and often heated shells to work in.
The flooring, wiring, plumbing, the myriad details of
finishing work could go ahead regardless of the weather.
♪ [music] ♪
And then in the next summer, there it was.
This phase was finished, cleaned up and we were moving to the next.
It wasn't the end of the story, either for the university or for us,
but it was possible for a moment to pause and enjoy the satisfaction of having turned
a site into a place.
After 18 months, we could stand back and take a good look at what we'd done.
It had been hard work, fast work but the important thing was that we had
got through on time.
A thousand students would enroll on the allotted day.
The University of York would open on time.
♪ [music] ♪
This landmark in many years of efforts,
brought to one man in particular a moment of satisfaction, the University's first
vice chancellor, Lord James of Rusholme.
- Well there we are then. That's the end of the first phase of this University,
the end of the first two years. And we ought to remind ourselves now I think of
the ideals with which the university started. The brief that we gave to our
architects, the buildings that got to be built fast in order to meet
the pressure of numbers from the outside. That they got to be built
economically to meet cost limits and that they got to be flexible because the university
isn't a thing that stays still. It's a thing that develops over the years.
And it also had to deal with other pressures, educational ones, the need in the modern
world to produce highly trained specialists, people who would add to
knowledge, push back its frontiers. And also men and women who would be able to
cope with more general problems of the modern world. We wanted to create a
community, a community that should be genuinely educational in which teacher and
taught should have a chance of meeting and talking together and in which young
people studying totally different disciplines should have the chance of
sharing the experiences. And the whole thing we envisaged as being against a
background that shouldn't be only functional, not only flexible, not only
economical but, also giving that sense of beauty which is so much a part of the
education of young people.
- So, tucked into a fold of its boundary, York, old, historic,
now has its new university, the promise of the 7th century fulfilled in the 20th.
♪ [music] ♪
- Here we have got our colleges, the smallest units which are the centers of the
social and to some extent for some the educational life of the
student and we also have our great departments; departments which we hope
will go on with the tradition of research and the discovery of new knowledge that
is part of the university ideal. And so, what we're trying to do
to provide a background which, because of this cooperation between architect
and client and builder, is a beautiful background, and to create a place which
shall be educational in the broader sense of the word for the young men and women
who live in it.
♪ [music] ♪