So much for the national map, location matters just as much when you get down to the local level too. For a start, it matters what the place looks like.

For instance, Stirling and Durham universities both have castles and are pretty easy on the eye. It requires a more unusual aesthetic sensibility, however, to appreciate the delights of the Enfield site of Middlesex University.

And local location raises all sorts of other questions as well:

• Where will you actually be living?
• How does that relate to where you’ll need to go for lectures, for shops or for a bit of fun?
• How do you get around between these places you need to go.
• Is it a rough part of town or one that you can’t get to after 8pm without a taxi?
• How does the local population feel about students? Would they rather hug ’em or hang ’em? In other words, how are ‘town/gown’ relations?

The answers to these and a press-gang of other questions depend on many factors. The following sections take a scalpel to the lot of them, dissecting the corpse of confusion and extracting the marrow.

In particular, on a day-to-day level, a lot of your hassles or happiness as a student may depend on the way the university is laid out on a local level. So the next part will look at some of the typical set-ups of universities — campuses, civic universities, multi-sites, colleges — and paint a picture of what choosing between them is likely to mean when it comes to the crunch. More...

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