New universities (United Kingdom)

The term new universities has been used informally to refer to several different waves of new universities created or renamed as such in the United Kingdom. Currently, the term is synonymous with post-1992 universities and sometimes modern universities, referring to the former polytechnics and central institutions given university status by John Major's government through the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, as well as the higher education college and other institutions granted university status since then under the Act (although not those institutions, such as Imperial College London and Cardiff University, granted university status since 1992 by royal charter). Though referred to as "new" or "modern", some of these universities have significant histories, having been founded under other titles from the early to mid 19th century (e.g. the University of Westminster, founded in 1838 as the Royal Polytechnic Institution, or the University of Winchester, established in 1840 as the Winchester Diocesan Training School).

For many centuries the only universities in England or Wales were Oxford and Cambridge (Scotland's tradition was quite different, with several mediaeval universities). Thus the term "new universities" was used in the mid 19th century to refer to the universities of Durham and London, as distinct from the "old universities" of Oxford and Cambridge. Following this, the term was applied to the civic universities of the early 20th centuries, such as Bristol University and others, afterwards known as the red brick universities. It later came to be used to refer to any of the universities founded in the 1960s: the Colleges of Advanced Technology that were converted to universities following the 1963 Robbins Report on higher education, and the plate glass universities, which were in the process of being established prior to the Robbins Report.

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