Designed by Kenneth Capon of Architects Co-Partnership the campus is set within Wivenhoe Park outside Colchester with the first phase being completed 1964-67

Capon’s plan ensures that everything is interrelated and mixed together, living as well as learning. The 28 towers express Essex’s academic ambitions and modernity. Newspapers called it a space age university. The Architects’ Journal wrote that AC-P’s plan related to ‘the most adventurous academic and social ideas to have emerged from the new universities. Nowhere does the layout of the buildings so closely trace the shape of the idea they serve.’ Capon summed up its character: ‘The English love making things shaggy and softening everything up. We decided to do something fierce to let them work within.’

Source: Something Fierce exhibition guide, Jules Lubbock 2014