Distance: 2.9 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
This walk from Newcastle-under-Lyme town centre, through the peri-urban fringe of the north Staffordshire Potteries conurbation, goes to little Keele University’s vast, parkland campus.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
A University More Radical Than It Looks
Perched high up on a ridge, in hilly north Staffordshire, to the west of the Potteries conurbation lies Keele University.
Perhaps more so than any other multi-faculty Midlands university, Keele lives up to the notion of the academic citadel on the hill, a modern monastery. Not least because with parts of its campus lying two hundred metres above sea level it is one of the highest universities in the country. Yet ever since its origins in the 1940s Keele has been closely linked to its north western Midlands surroundings as well as nearby Cheshire and North Wales.
Having been established as a university college in 1949, and then granted its own degree awarding powers independent in 1962, Keele University is just about old enough to be counted amongst the Midlands oldest universities like Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham. Rather than the wave of institutions like Warwick, Aston and Loughborough which were created later in the 1960s, as part of the era’s great wave of university expansion which included York, Stirling and Bradford.
There had been a clamour in the Potteries and the surrounding area for a university since the 1890s. But, it was not until 1946 when Alexander Lindsay, an Oxford professor and left-wing anti-appeaser in the 1930s, who had strong ties to the adult education movement, entered the House of Lords as part of the post-1945 Labour government’s efforts to dilute the upper chamber’s membership in its favour, that the idea gained serious traction. By the 1940s the Potteries was the largest urban area in the UK with no higher education provision. Lindsay through his involvement in the adult education movement had advocated the creation of a university for the area since at least 1925.
With the ear of a government sympathetic to adult education and research alike, Lindsay saw a way to gain support for a new university serving Stoke-on-Trent and its surrounding area. Sir Walter Moberley, the Chair of the University Grants Committee, which between 1915 and 1989 was the body which funded higher education in the UK, was known for railing against “the evils of departmentalisation”, or in plainer terms the divide between the arts and the sciences. Aware of this in May 1946 Lindsay wrote to him suggesting an experiment be conducted to see whether it was possible to create a university that elided this divide. In doing so he suggested that north Staffordshire and the Potteries could be the perfect area for testing this model out, given the need for skilled and innovative technical and administrative staff in the area’s mining, metalworking and ceramics industries.
Lindsay was also keen to get away from the University of London being the de facto sponsor of all degrees awarded in England outside Oxbridge, and a few huge civic universities established during the Victorian era like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. So, while trying to encourage the University Grants Committee to fund a new institution in north Staffordshire he also approached the University of Oxford to see whether they would be willing to accredit degrees awarded by such an institution. Enabling it to avoid having to seek the support of the University of London and to award their degrees.
In 1948 following all of this behind the scenes work Stoke-on-Trent City Council established a committee to advance the establishment of a higher education institution for the city. They alighted upon Keele Hall, a disused mansion just outside Newcastle-under-Lyme, which had been the seat of the Syned family for centuries. It had been requisition by the army during the Second World War, and in addition to Keele Hall itself and its extensive parkland, it came with numerous prefabricated structures the army had erected. The council bought the building and the surrounding land off the Syned family for £31,000 enabling the establishment of the North Staffordshire University College to proceed.
While being quite elderly by this point he did not hold the post for very long, Alexander Lindsay was appointed the founding principal of the new university college at Keele. Thanks to the endorsement of the University of Oxford, Keele was able to award its own degrees from the off. The new higher education institution flourished throughout the 1950s having 1,200 students by 1962 when it became a university.
During the early years the modernist core of the campus, as well as features like Keele’s little space observatory took shape. The university’s early success continued throughout these years with pioneering departments like one for the study of International Relations opening in 1974. The university’s small size, only 2,700 in 1985, roughly half the numbers studying at North Staffordshire Polytechnic (now the University of Staffordshire) in central Stoke-on-Trent meant that the institution, in common with other UK universities, began to struggle financially in the 1970s as inflation ate into the spending power of the university’s income. Real terms cuts under the Thatcher government to higher education funding in the early 1980s meant that Keele University came worryingly close to folding. It was this which led the university in the mid-1980s to seriously consider a merger with North Staffordshire Polytechnic.
These days the university remains small with only around 12,000 students, however, it is a very different institution. The opening of a medical school in the 2000s and a veterinary school in the 2020s has led it to pivot sharply towards teaching and research in disciplines focused upon health, social care and medical science. Alongside the opening of a science park and conferencing facilities, and some significant success developing innovations and spin-outs from the university’s research, have made Keele a successful and sustainable small university. One which makes a big play of its connections to the Stoke-on-Trent conurbation to its east.
Perhaps due to its isolated location Keele has always had an unusually large proportion of its student body live in halls of residence on campus. It is also marked by its extensive parklands. A feature which as well as being enjoyed by the university’s staff and students is popular with local people who come onto the site to enjoy the parkland lawns, shady pools and wooded areas.
The Walk
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.
This walk to Keele University begins from Newcastle-under-Lyme Bus Station.
Newcastle-under-Lyme is a large town, contiguous with, but administratively separate from the city of Stoke-on-Trent. There are frequent buses to the town from the bus stations in Hanley and Stoke-upon-Trent, and many of them pass near the city’s railway station.
At Newcastle-under-Lyme bus station upon alighting, leave the central island walking straight ahead, to reach a main pedestrianised road heading into the centre of the town.
Walk straight ahead down this road through Newcastle-under-Lyme’s shopping centre until you reach the central square.
Cross the central square and head straight downhill along a road straight in front of you. It is quite steep and you continue until you reach a main road running along the bottom edge of the town centre. The road runs near the course of the little Lyme Brook which runs in a south easterly direction towards its confluence with the River Trent.
Upon reaching the side of the busy main road turn left heading down into a subway.
Walk through the subway and then turn right up a ramp to reach the pavement on the far side of the road.
Here turn left, following the road around past a branch of Aldi.
Presently you reach a set of traffic lights. Use them to cross the road.
On the far side of the road turn right, then left onto a walkway alongside the Lyme Brook.
Soon you reach a road, where there is a little park on the far side, which you walk straight across.
Having crossed the park turn right picking up a path running along the Lyme Brook.
Continue along the path for quite some way.
Presently you reach a wide grassy bank, which tapers quite sharply. Walk straight along the top of this bank which forms part of a small park.
At the far end of the bank turn right, picking up a path, exiting the park onto the side of a road.
Cross the road and then turn left.
Continue straight ahead along this road for quite some distance. It runs along the southern edge of the former mining village of Silverdale. Silverdale Colliery was the last deep colliery to operate in Staffordshire closing in 1998. In 1996 a coal waste tip at the site caught fire. It continues to burn to this day.
As you walk off to the left you see, and probably smell, the controversial Walleys Quarry Landfill.
Presently you reach a traffic light controlled crossroads junction. Here turn left crossing the road and heading down a road to the left past a cemetery.
After a short distance cross the road and then carry on along the pavement.
Continue straight along the road until presently you reach a turn in the road running to the left.
Here there is a footpath sign pointing across a couple of stiles up onto a footpath running uphill.
Having crossed the stiles carry on straight up the footpath which is bounded by two sets of fences dividing it from the fields.
At the top there is a stile leading into woodland which you cross. There is a great view from the top of the hill across the Potteries conurbation.
Once inside the woodland follow the path to the left.
Soon you reach another stile out across the corner of a field, which you cross and then clamber over a corresponding stile.
After crossing this stile follow a path up the bank in front of you a stile out onto the side of the road which runs along the top of the escarpment you have just climbed.
Upon reaching the side of the road turn right.
Continue along the road until you reach some traffic lights where you cross.
On the far side of the road straight ahead of you, there is a pedestrian entrance for the Keele University campus which you walk through.
Having entered the campus continue along the path which soon comes out into a car park for the university’s hotel and science park.
Head right across the car park.
Presently you reach a road running straight ahead past science park buildings and halls of residence towards the heart of the university campus.
Take a path running to the right down past a recently constructed bank of halls of residence.
At the bottom of the slope you reach a road. Cross over here and follow a path to the left until you reach the square in front of the students’ union building, just down from the somewhat bizarre postmodern structure, a little like a townhall where the university’s central administration is based. In the square there stands Diane Maclean’s Forest of Light a stainless steel sculpture installed in 2012 to mark the university’s fiftieth anniversary.
From the square to reach Keele Hall walk straight ahead beneath a fire escape extending from the students’ union building.
Walk straight along the path through woodland, until you reach the gateway into the courtyard in front of Keele Hall. One of the entrances to the courtyard is known as “Fresher’s Gate”.
Walk across the courtyard past Keele Hall to reach the open parkland beyond.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
At the time of writing in November 2024 bus 25 ran at fifteen minute intervals from the Keele University campus via Newcastle-under-Lyme town centre, Stoke town centre, close to Stoke-on-Trent Railway Station, terminating at Hanley Bus Station. There was also a bus 8 running between Keele and Newcastle-under-Lyme Bus Station.