page_title: Highfield Campus
section_title: 1950s and Basil Spence masterplan
hierarchical_section_title: Highfield Campus / History / 1950s and Basil Spence masterplan
caption_attribution_description: English: Faraday Tower, University of Southampton Viewed from the new Education, Engineering and Entrance building
context_page_description: Highfield Campus is the main campus of the University of Southampton and is located in Southampton, southern England. It is the largest of the University's campuses with most of the students studying there. The campus is also the location of the main university library, the students' union as well as sports facilities.
context_section_description: Following the creation of the University by royal charter in 1952, numbers at the University were set to increase again to around 2,500 by the mid 1960s. As a result, the university estate needed to expand and the inadequate facilities needed to be replaced. The end of the 1950s saw an explosion of building work in a whole variety of styles. 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), both designed by Ronald H Sims. In addition, Gutteridge and Gutteridge were undertaking several extensions to pre-existing buildings: the Physics building in 1960, the Education building in 1961 and the Library in 1959. Whereas the first two extensions were in the same style as the earlier building, the new Gurney-Dixon library extension was built in a modernist style, linking the three main buildings together and providing space for 150,000 books and 400 readers.
  The remaining buildings were built under the direction of Sir Basil Spence, who was appointed as Consultant Architect in 1956. All of the buildings designed by him used mainly concrete and glass wrapped in mosaic and were each centred around a focal area either to the east or west of University Road, ignoring the road in doing so. The first buildings were completed in 1959 and included the Froude building, built for Social Sciences and located in the centre of Engineering Square, and the Lanchester and Tizard buildings for the Engineering, Electronics and Aerospace studies, located on the north of the square and connected to the pre-existing engineering facilities. 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).
  As a new decade dawned construction work started to become dominated by two large tower structures: the Graham Hills tower, built over 1960 and 1961, providing accommodation for Chemistry in the south east corner of Engineering Square and the Faraday tower, built between 1960 and 1963, for Engineering in the north east corner of Engineering Square.
  The next building to be completed was the Arts building (now the Law school) and adjoining Nuffield Theatre. Built between 1961 and 1963, the building allowed the Arts faculty to leave the central building for the first time and expand. 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. 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. These are the Physics building, complete with observatory, the Geology building (now renamed the Shackleton building and housing Geography and Psychology since 1996) and the Students' Union building.
  The final buildings matching the style of the Basil Spence Masterplan were the Arts II building (now Management and Music since 1996), built in 1968, a further extension to the Engineering accommodation in the form of the Wolfson and Raleigh buildings that same year and the Murray building, housing the Social Sciences departments, in 1975.
caption: The Faraday Tower, completed in 1963.
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