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I live in the North West of England, and one of the questions my international students ask most often is: ‘Is Liverpool or Manchester a good place to study?’ My honest answer is that you are spoilt for choice (= you have so many good options that it is hard to choose). The two cities are less than an hour apart by train, they have a long and friendly rivalry (= competition), and between them they have some of the most interesting universities in the country. So this is the first post in a new series about life in and around Liverpool, and I want to start with the universities.

Where the ‘red brick’ university began

You may have heard British people describe a university as ‘red brick’. The phrase means one of the big civic universities (= universities founded in large industrial cities) that gained university status in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rather than the ancient ones like Oxford and Cambridge. The original six are Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, so our two cities are both on the list.

The term itself was coined (= invented) in Liverpool. In 1943 Edgar Allison Peers, a professor of Spanish at the University of Liverpool, wrote a book called Redbrick University under a false name, and the red brick he had in mind was partly that of the university’s Victoria Building, with its clock tower. If you visit, it is now the Victoria Gallery and Museum, and you can walk straight in.

Liverpool

The University of Liverpool started life in 1881 as University College Liverpool and received its royal charter in 1903. It is a member of the Russell Group, the group of research-intensive universities that you will often see mentioned in UK university rankings. One of its early professors, Ronald Ross, won the 1902 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on malaria, which made him the first British Nobel laureate.

The city has several other universities too. Liverpool John Moores University and Liverpool Hope University are both popular with international students, and then there is LIPA, the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. It opened in 1996 in the building of the old Liverpool Institute for Boys, which happens to be Paul McCartney’s old school, and McCartney helped to plan it. For anyone who loves music, as I do, studying in a building connected to a Beatle is quite something.

Manchester

Manchester’s university history reads a bit like a science textbook. At the University of Manchester, Ernest Rutherford carried out the research that led to the splitting of the atom. In June 1948, Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams ran ‘the Baby’, the world’s first stored-program computer, there. And in 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated graphene, the thinnest material in the world, which won them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. The university counts 26 Nobel laureates among its current and former staff and students.

Like Liverpool, Manchester has more than one university: Manchester Metropolitan University sits right in the city centre, the University of Salford is just next door, and the Royal Northern College of Music trains musicians from all over the world.

And your English?

One thing nobody mentions in the brochures: you will be learning two of the most recognisable accents in Britain. Scouse in Liverpool and Mancunian in Manchester sound quite different from the English on exam recordings, and from each other, as any local will happily tell you. It takes a few weeks to tune in (= get used to it), and then you start to love it.

In the next posts in this series, I will write about what makes each city fascinating outside the lecture theatre. If you are planning to study here and want to be ready for your first week, book a free 30-minute chat with me.

Sources: Redbrick university (Wikipedia); University of Liverpool (Wikipedia); University of Manchester: Our achievements; University of Manchester: Nobel Prize for Physics; LIPA: Our story.