What was it like to be a York student in the 70s?

Following on from our look back at student life in the 60s last month, it’s only natural that we proceed to reminisce about student life in the 1970s! In this special blog post we hear from alum Peter Shields, who studied at York between 1974 and 1978. He tells us all about college discos, Langwith snack bar, life without internet and more tales from the past…

The University campus in 1974

I was a Language student doing Linguistics, French and Hindi – a 4-year course on which the
2nd year was spent abroad – in my case in France. When I arrived at York, most of the campus was only around 10 years old, and the now mighty trees were still saplings. It looked new and modern, and there were long vistas which these days are obscured by mature trees and subsequent building. The lake and ducks were already well established, and you could hire a rowing boat on the lake.

I was allocated to Langwith, where in my first year I was assigned to a single room on the top floor of D block, two corridors (all male) sharing a communal kitchen and dining area. Mine was a former twin room that had been subdivided into two rooms with a stud partition and the soundproofing between the two was not good – I had to endure a lot of Elton John at high volume from the guy on the other side of the wall, and he had to endure my guitar playing.

There were still some twin rooms around, and some First Years found themselves involuntarily paired up with another first year student of the same sex. Couples could request a twin room together, but these arrangements often fell apart when the couple split up. University accommodation was guaranteed in the first year and final year but you had to move off campus in the middle year.

There was an extraordinary system in Langwith of queuing for the room of your choice. At the end of the second year the off-campus students would queue all night outside the Langwith Admin Office, some with sleeping bags, to get the room they wanted in the 3rd year. That way, you had some hope of being on a corridor with bigger and better rooms, or on a corridor near your friends.

Language students, spending the 2nd year away, could not feasibly find off-campus
accommodation for their return, and were allowed campus accommodation for both their 3rd
and 4th years. But how could they take part in the queue? The answer was that at the end of
their 1st year they joined the 2nd years in their queue and bagged the room that their place in
the queue entitled them to – not for the coming year, but for a year hence!

I was on the top floor of Langwith’s C Block in my 3rd year. By now, sexes were confined to
corridors, not to a whole floor, so we had a corridor of boys and a corridor of girls sharing
common facilities in the middle.

In my final year I was in a very new 10-bedroom house in St Lawrence Court,
where we were 4 boys and 6 girls. We weren’t a friendship group – I only knew one of the
others beforehand – but we all got on fine, scrupulously sharing the cost of our daily
Guardian and our milk delivery. St Lawrence Court had all the benefits of being “in hall” (we
still had a cleaner!) but as a house-share felt a little more grown-up.

Student politics

We undergraduates were very politically correct, although it wasn’t a term we used back then. Feminism was waxing strong, and we strove to be egalitarian. I remember the Junior Common Room debating Period Poverty (again, not a term we used) and considering whether there should be a levy on male students to help fund the period products that female students have to buy, given that we
were all on the same annual grant. The meeting concluded that the JCR had no powers to
impose such a measure, but there was plenty of support for it.

Gay Liberation was blossoming at that time too, and it was considered okay to be openly gay in campus circles but remained more challenging in wider society.

The NUS (National Union of Students) supported the miners who were on and off with industrial action throughout the 70s and sent speakers to address our meetings. There was also a national student strike whilst I was at York, and the administrative offices in Heslington Hall were occupied.

Gigs and Discos

The best gig I have ever attended remains Dr Feelgood in 1974 in Langwith dining hall (now known as the Hendrix Room). Other on-campus gig highlights were Caravan, Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance, and The Electric Light Orchestra, all in Central Hall, Supercharge (in Alcuin) and Deaf School (in Derwent, I think). There were regular Discos in all the Colleges.

In my third year (1976/7) I was in a covers band called ‘Satyricon & The Fragments’. We rehearsed weekly in the Physics lecture room PX/001 (which we had to rent by the hour, I recall). We played one of our gigs in the Langwith JCR. Our diverse repertoire included Beatles, Faces, Procol Harum, Frank Zappa, and Focus. 50 years on I am still performing at pub Open Mics and with a covers band!

Sport

I took no part in organised sport on campus, although there was plenty of it, but I was active in transporting a group of us from Langwith once a week into town for swimming at one of the public indoor pools. Up to eight of us went in two cars. There were no swimming pools on campus back then – and now there are two.

‘Jogging’ had entered the dictionary by the mid 1970s. Previously, the only people you saw going out for a run were footballers or rugby players in training. Now, running was starting to become a thing, and in my final year a group of us would do a weekly three mile circuit from Heslington out to the construction site of the A64 dual carriageway.

Communications

No internet, no social media… how did we manage?

Our department relied on its Departmental Notice Board, and putting notes in our
departmental pigeonholes, and the College relied on leafletting the tables of the College
dining rooms with newsletters. We also had pigeonholes in Langwith by the Porters’ Lodge
for our external post which might be used for the occasional College communication.
Those wishing to publicise events, clubs, societies, would also use the corridor
noticeboards and leaflet the dining tables as a way of spreading the word. Of course, not
everyone ate in the College’s self-service dining room – some self-catered all the time – but
most of us did at least once a day.

The university’s student newspaper was (and still is) Nouse, edited in my time by Mark
Laity who went on to be a BBC defence correspondent. I contributed a gig review or two.

For phone calls we used the payphones adjacent to the Porters’ Lodge. We wrote and received a lot of letters. Getting post was an important part of life. We would even occasionally write to our student friends in the holidays, as we weren’t great users of the phone. I was unusual amongst my contemporaries in having a typewriter, just in my final year. I would draft my essays in longhand and often type them up.

There was a communal colour television in a TV room adjacent to the Langwith Junior Common Room on the first floor. Only three channels in those days – BBC1, BBC 2 and ITV. We sometimes made an effort to catch Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and Spike Milligan’s “Q6”, but mostly we didn’t bother with it. I knew of one student who had his own portable TV in his room, relying on its own aerial, but this was truly a rarity. We were all more interested in listening to our record or cassette collections than watching TV. Most of us listened to the radio, too. We music nerds were particularly keen on John Peel’s late-night programme on Radio 1.

York Student TV was also available on wall-mounted black-and-white sets in the Colleges, relayed via cable. We made a point of watching Victor Lewis-Smith’s “Intimate Freshness” comic programme, which he hosted and presented under the alias “Damien Filth”.

Snack bar

There was a student-run evening snack bar in Langwith, staffed by student volunteers on a rota who were rewarded with free hot drinks and cheese toasties, and I think £1/hour (around the minimum wage at the time). The menu was hot drinks, cheese toasties, and confectionary, biscuits and crisps. I think the purchasing was done by the Junior Common Room (JCC) committee.

Money

We mostly used cash. For larger purchases we used cheques, along with a Cheque Guarantee Card – in appearance like a debit card, but you couldn’t make payments with it and most banks didn’t have ATMs. To obtain cash, you visited a branch of your bank and wrote a cheque for “Cash”. £10 a week sufficed for everyday spending, back then. Heslington High Street in the 1970s had branches of Barclays, Midland (now HSBC), National Westminster and Lloyds. We students were discouraged by the NUS from using Barclays because of alleged associations with Apartheid in South Africa, and there was occasional waving of placards outside Barclays branches.

Graduation… and coming back

I didn’t attend graduation, as it took place a week or so after we had to give up our university accommodation, and I had returned to Devon, 325 miles away. There was no way I was going to trek back to York for Graduation Day, and my parents seemed happy with that decision. So when I said goodbye at the end of my final term, it really was Goodbye.

I kept in touch with a few friends whilst we were all in our first jobs in London, but this mostly fizzled out after a year or two. Having got into software development, a transferable skill, I moved back to Devon in 1983 and have since only kept in touch with three friends from uni days.

I didn’t visit the campus again for nearly 30 years, in 2007, and was amazed at how the trees
had grown. The old Langwith was still recognisably Langwith, though. I revisited in 2019 and
found that Derwent has eaten up the old Langwith, and there is now a new Langwith on the
wondrous Campus East. The university has grown from 3,500 students in my day to over 20,000
today.

A huge thank you to alum Peter Shields for contributing his memories. If you enjoyed reading this, why not take a trip further back in time and read what it was like to be a student in the first years of the University. If reading this post has brought back memories of your time at York too, we’d love to read them in the comments!