Self storage and university towns

What makes a university town? It seems to be an expression that gets bandied about a lot, especially by certain companies – including self storage companies – who are eager to adopt the air of sophistication that accompanies it, but what does it actually mean?

Not all towns with universities are ‘university towns’

The most obvious requirement is that a town has to have some kind of higher education institution attached to it. Yet even within this definition, there are inconsistencies.

Let’s start with London. While this aspect tends to get a bit obscured by extraordinary bustle of other activities going on in the city, London is one of the world’s great higher education centres.

In both 2008 and 2009, London came top in the Global University Index, recognizing it as the city with the greatest clustering of world-renowned higher education institutions and international students. Around 135,000 students are enrolled within the University of London at any one time, studying at a range of colleges that includes some of the biggest names in the global higher education sector – UCL, King’s, Imperial, LSE and Royal Holloway – as well as a lot of smaller, more specialist institutions.

Yet London is never referred to as a university town, because none of the universities are large enough to dominate its cultural and economic life. That seems to be one of the main criteria for obtaining this label, although even this isn’t always enough.

The two quintessential university towns are often thought to be Oxford and Cambridge, which are known internationally for little else besides the quality mark that accompanies their respective seats of learning.

Yet Oxford is actually much bigger than Cambridge, according to the 2001 census. In fact, the latter has a mere 88,000 permanent residents once you deduct the 20,000 or so students who are there for only part of the year, while Oxford is home to 160,000 people, making it nearly twice as big.

This means Cambridge genuinely feels small enough to be dominated by the ancient cloisters of its colleges, while Oxford has enough external life going on outside the University to have slightly outgrown the label of ‘university town’. Nevertheless it remains fixed to that identity in the popular imagination, showing how this concept has more to do with perception than reality.

Applying the label

Other places commonly referred to as university towns tend to be home to ancient universities, whose attractive architecture lures in almost as many tourists each year as students – Durham, St Andrews, York etc, places that have a certain historic feel to them, where life is felt to be more insulated from the outside world, and to move at a slower pace.

By contrast, newer universities that don’t have such pretty buildings tend to receive much shorter shrift from the popular imagination when it comes to being thought of as university towns, even though their populations may be just as dominated by students.

This has become particularly striking since the 1970s, when new universities (often upgraded polytechnics) began taking up residence in former industrial areas made available by the collapse of traditional industries, giving them very large student populations.

Dundee is never thought of as a university town, even though it contains two universities; neither is Wolverhampton. Salford, a previously blighted part of inner-city Manchester, is now home to a very large student community thanks to its new university; yet, for most, it has yet to shake off its post-industrial grime.

Clearly, being considered a university town is about a lot more than actually having a university. So what does it entail?

Style and sophistication

The idea of the university town seems, to a large extent, to be a creation of both the popular imagination and certain advertisers looking for a way to build their products’ brand.

The clothing company Jack Wills has become one of the best examples of this in recent years. They’re a high-end retailer aimed at the wealthier slice of Britain’s adolescent community, whose brand has been almost entirely constructed around the idea of the trendy, so-called ‘preppy’ university way of life.

This runs right from their slogan ‘University Outfitters’ (although they are not affiliated to any particular university) through to the designs of the garments themselves, which consciously mimic traditional university styles, such as the rugby jumper and the college polo shirt.

The journalist Polly Vernon perceptively analyzed this marketing style when she wrote a profile of them in the Guardian: ‘Jack Wills took a clean-living, attractively bookish yet sporty idea of the university experience – a fragrant dream of long walks and swift halves and flirty glances across the library – and distilled it into cotton jersey pieces, non-slutty lingerie, denim and knits.’

She goes on to explain: ‘Over 11 years, Jack Wills expanded to become a chain of 30 stores, five of which are in London, the rest in affluent university towns and seaside resorts. You know you’re posh if you live near one.’

It’s that last sentence that seems to capture the essence of the university town in Britain; somewhere implicitly seen as ‘posh’ (whatever that overused expression really means), with an innate air of style and sophistication running through life there, emanating out from the seat of learning, and definitely not found in places that don’t have one.

Self storage and the university town

Other brands beside Jack Wills attempt to acquire an air of sophistication through their marketing, with Waitrose supermarkets being another obvious example. Being located in university towns is an effective way of doing this, as they not only contain at least some sophisticated, intelligent people by definition; they are thought by the world at large to contain probably a lot more than they actually do.

The public image of a university town also includes a certain degree of prosperity – real or imagined. ‘Affluent university towns’ is how Polly Vernon puts it. If a high street begins to fill with high-calibre shops drawn by this cachet, then the prosperity can be self-fulfilling.

Self storage is another business that likes the image attached to university towns. The major self storage companies all want self storage to be seen as a product for the sophisticated, metropolitan middle-classes – the kind of people university students are meant to grow into.

But self storage companies have another good reason to focus on university towns: it makes good business sense to have branches in the major university towns, for the simple reason that lots of students – particularly the ever-growing number from overseas – need somewhere to leave their belongings while between addresses during the holidays. And academics need somewhere to store their possessions as they move between posts.

So, a lot of those sophisticated consumer goods bought from the upmarket high-streets of the university towns could spend time in self storage.