William Whyte is Senior Dean and Associate Professor of History at St John's College, Oxford. He is the author of Oxford Jackson: architecture, education, status and style (2006), and editor of several other books, including George Gilbert Scott: an architect and his influence (2014).

Shortlisted for the History Today Book Prize 2016; shortlisted for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain: Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 2016

"Whyte has written a fascinating architectural and social history of the development of British universities" -- A.W. Purdue, Northern History

"Whyte has breathed new life into the history of British universities."--Emily Rutherford, Twentieth Century British History

"The book is comprehensive, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present; it perceptively attends to false starts and fictional accounts, alongside more familiar and lasting successes; and it is deeply researched, generously illustrated, and beautifully written throughout...Redbrick belongs on the shelf of every historian of architecture, universities, and indeed modern Britain, and it should also inform wider discussions about the university in Britain past, present, and future."--Journal of Modern History

"A magnificent review of the two-centuries-long evolution of the civics...[P]erceptive."--David Palfreyman, Times Higher Education

"Authoritatively and perceptively as it makes a case for its subject, in prose that is often amusing as well as elegant...[I]t makes a refreshing change to wish that a book had been much longer"--The Victorian

"This superb book is the first history to cover the history of British civic universities in 50 years...Whyte draws on a formidable array of archival research, discovering piquant quotes from a range of obscure sources...[T]he portrait of Britain's civic universities that emerges is, in the end, one that is almost 'beautiful' because it is a human portrait rather than an institutional one...The book will obviously be of interest to those specializing in the history of education. However, the book's methodology, which is cogently set out in the introduction, should be read by all scholars thinking about how to write histories of the way societies interact with the physical environments that they occupy."--Urban History

"Whyte's highly readable study of civic universities fills a significant gap in the history of higher education...[A]n outstanding book...[I]t brims with life by meaningfully weaving in the stories of the men and, by the late nineteenth century, the women who attended universities and inhabited their buildings. It transcends the history of education to reveal the central place of civic universities in the evolution of the modern state, the making of the middle class, and the mutual tempering of social radicalism and conservatism."--Journal of British Studies

"Rich, varied and amusing...Whyte deserves congratulation for his thoughtful, perceptive and witty work."--History Today