Plate glass university

[1] The term plateglass was coined by Michael Beloff for a book he wrote about these universities,[3] to reflect their modern architectural design which often contains wide expanses of plate glass in steel or concrete frames.

"Whitebrick", "Whitestone", and "Pinktile" hardly conjure up the grey or biscuit concrete massiveness of most of their buildings, and certainly not the black towers of Essex.

[3]Beloff applied the term specifically to the new creations of the 1960s, not including the institutions promoted from university colleges or colleges of advanced technology, or created by division of existing universities "as Durham shed Newcastle".

[a] The university in Norwich, which is in the county of Norfolk, was instead named for the wider area of East Anglia which also includes Suffolk and Essex.

There were already universities within those counties (Manchester and Liverpool in Lancashire; Sheffield, Leeds and Hull in Yorkshire).

Research at the Department for Education in 2016 categorised universities into four age groups: ancient (pre-1800), red brick (1800–1960), plate glass (1960–1992), and post-1992.

[18] Malcolm Bradbury's 1975 campus novel The History Man is set in the fictional plate glass University of Watermouth.