Highfield Campus
[3] The campus was opened after the war in October 1919 with the college using two buildings (now forming part of the Hartley Library) which housed classes and laboratory facilities for the three hundred students.
[4] Due to difficulties in selling them on for a reasonable price, the High Street premises remained part of the college until the mid-1930s when they were sold for a combined total of £8,000.
[11] The social experience was also improved with the creation of an assembly hall in the 1920s large enough to house the student population.
[18] Built on the site of Sir Sidney Kimber's brickyard, the building housed the refectory, common rooms and the Students' Union and was further extended to include an assembly hall, suitable for performances and examinations, in 1948.
On the West site, a new computer building was built in 1958 and a Tidal model of Southampton Water constructed in 1957 (now the John Hansard Gallery[22]), both designed by Ronald H Sims.
[23] The following year the extension of the west building was completed and linked in with a new Senior Common Room (now known as the Staff Social Centre).
Adjacent to Arts 1 is the Mathematics tower, built between 1963 and 1965 by Ronald H Sims in the brutalist style and thus is notably different from the buildings around it with exposed concrete.
[34] Also around the same time, Oceanography received a new building north of the campus on Burgess Road (now housing part of Electronics and Computer Science since 1996), which was completed in 1965 and designed in brick by the Sheppard Robson Partnership.
The pace continued with three buildings completed in close proximity in 1966 along the southern edge of the west side of the campus.
These buildings were notable in that their layout differed from the plans laid out by Basil Spence a decade earlier, although the styling remained the same.
Following on from these high impact developments, the campus saw several smaller developments: Clarkson House, a small halls of residence suitable for disabled students and now the Early Years Centre, opened in 1978 just south of the Administration building and partly funded by the British Council for the Disabled, the Clarkson Foundation and the Department of Health and Social Security.
[53] None of these eventually occurred as the university and the Consultancy lobbied the council and were able to change the guidance to allow further development to be easier.
[58] Following the lobbying of the council from the university and Chesterton Consulting, local planning laws were altered, removing the need for additional parking spaces on campus.
[59] This change led to the introduction of the Unilink bus service, and also made the Chesterton master plan completely obsolete.
[69][70] Necessitating the demolition of some minor buildings in the square, the Library extension housed new facilities for Archives and Special collections, additional shelf and reader space.
In 2005 a fire broke out in the Mountbatten building, causing the ECS department to be crippled until replacement facilities could be found.
[83] The new and replacement Mountbatten building was opened in 2008 and included new and updated clean rooms while still being an environmentally friendly design.
