In the 1950s and especially the 1960s, the landscape of Higher Education in the UK changed dramatically. A report for the government by the economist Lionel Robbins concluded that Britain was falling behind its rivals because the proportion of young Britons who went to university was too low. It recommended that anyone capable of benefiting from university study should be permitted to undertake it. These recommendations were quickly put into effect. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had seen the creation of the so-called ‘redbrick universities’, situated in the larger provincial cities, especially in the Midlands and the North, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool and Leicester; History Departments in these universities were often dominated by diplomatic and political historians, though Economic History Departments also emerged in them. Following the Robbins report, the so-called ‘plate-glass universities’ were founded in the 1960s – Sussex, East Anglia, Warwick, Lancaster, Kent, Stirling, Essex and others – and were joined by a number of upgraded polytechnics. Among other things, this meant a vast expansion of the historical profession, as of other academic professions, with jobs at the new universities virtually going begging for Junior Research Fellows of Oxbridge Colleges, successful doctoral students and, in some cases, postgraduates who had barely embarked on their research.

The new universities were in the vast majority of cases determined to break free from what they saw as the stuffy and conservative mould of the redbricks and profile themselves as innovative, pathbreaking institutions. They became the home of the latest trend in History – Social History, located at Warwick in the Centre for Social History, at most other places squarely in the middle of the History Department or as a section within an Interdisciplinary School.