About Britain by Cole Tim;

Author:Cole, Tim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-23T11:52:30+00:00

208

east midlands and the peak

The building boom of private halls in Loughborough and elsewhere bore witness to the fact that the majority of British students continue to leave home. Four out of five continue the tradition imagined in the Robbins Report that students would attend the university best suited to their needs, rather than the one closest to their home as is the case elsewhere in Europe.

Each autumn sees the mass migration of a large number of young people, mainly drawn from middle-class southern England to a number of northern cities with large universities, before they return to the south once they graduate.29 But the growth in higher education means that there are not only lots of British students on the move each year, there is also a large number of young people from across the world as higher education has become a global market. Just under 500,000 international students study in British universities, with China accounting for more than 20 per cent of these. 30 To attract even more of this lucrative market, Loughborough opened a second campus, 100 miles to the south, in East London in the mid-2010s. The location, in the area developed to host the 2012 Olympic Games, was carefully chosen given Loughborough’s reputation as the pre-eminent home of elite sport, and the taught masters courses offered, in sport business for example, were aimed primarily at international students who preferred the lifestyle of the capital over that found in a small East Midland town.

Leaving Loughborough, at the end of the school day, I passed streams of uniformed children walking home, lacking the multicoloured house ties I’d seen in Uppingham. I passed through the layered landscape of a small industrial town: canals, new housing, ring roads, the Silbey Fabrications factory and the Brush electrical factory. Here was continuity with the names reeled off by Hoskins in 1951 as he informed readers that ‘most of the larger East Midland towns have important engineering industries with firms of household names – notably Rolls-Royce 209

about britain

at Derby, Raleigh at Nottingham, Imperial typewriters at Leicester, Brush electrical equipment at Loughborough . . .’

Imperial closed in the mid-1970s, but the rest remain open for business in their long-standing hometowns in the heart of what is not quite entirely post-industrial Britain.

Entering farmland once more, I saw bales piled high in the fields and a little further on a farm advertising sacks of potatoes for sale. The road ran parallel to an estate wall for a stretch.

The old house on the other side was now, inevitably perhaps, a wedding venue that promised couples that they would ‘feel like you are marrying “At Home, at Prestwold Hall”’. Away from the hall and gardens, another part of the estate had been turned into a green burial site, offering interment in a setting that will ‘eventually create wildlife-rich natural woodland with wildflower glades’ filled with ‘primroses, cowslips and oxeye daisy’.31 The greening of burial was mirrored by the greening of energy with a cluster of wind turbines to the left before I crossed the old Fosse Way and drove down to Melton Mowbray.

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