Calon Lan, the Welsh hymn tune, introduced a public appeal from Swansea University in 1960 for a massive £400,000 – the equivalent of over £8 million today. The music was designed to appeal to the patriotism of businesses, alumni and the public so that they would help fund a massive expansion of the University’s Singleton Park site, which would eventually make it one of the forerunners of British campus universities. This public appeal was part of a story that made Swansea University an important player in the history of post-war university building and architecture.

My name is Sam Blaxland and I have just written a book about Swansea University to mark its 2020 centenary, called Swansea University: Campus and Community in a Post-War World, 1945-2020. In this four past series I am going to explore some of the more unusual and interesting things I uncovered during this research.

In this second episode, I discuss the physical expansion of the University, showing how the plans to develop a campus from the early 1950s was a radical plan. I also explore how this impacted upon, and fundamentally changed, university life there.