with the first building completed a year later. The first on-campus student residences opened in 1968.
Unlike some other campus universities, Bailrigg was designed to integrate social, residential and teaching areas. Another major feature of the design is that there is no large central Students' Union building, instead individual college facilities are used as the centre for social and recreational activities .
Vehicular and pedestrian traffic is separated: this is achieved by restricting motor vehicles to a peripheral road with a linking underpass running east–west beneath Alexandra Square. The underpass accommodates the Bailrigg bus station and was refurbished in autumn 2010. Car parking is arranged in cul-de-sacs running off the peripheral road.
The campus buildings are arranged around a central walkway known as "The Spine". The walkway runs from north (County College) to south-west (Graduate College) and is covered for most of its length. The main architect was Gabriel Epstein of Shepheard and Epstein. Architect Peter Shepheard recalls:
"We went up there on a windy day, and it was freezing cold. Every time we opened a plan it blew away. And we said Christ! What are we going to do with these students, where are they going to sit in the sun and all that? Well, we decided, it's got to be cloisters. All of the buildings have got to touch at the ground. We then devised this system and it had an absolutely firm principle: it had a great spine down the middle where everybody walked. That led everywhere. The cars were on the outside, on both sides. When you came into the spaces things were square, they were rectangular courtyards and they were all slightly different. There were two or three essentials: one was that the covered way had to be continuous, the buildings had to be three or four storeys high and connecting to the next one. I thought it worked very well."
Between 2016 and 2018 the Spine was extensively remodelled in a project known as "Design The Spine", with the aim of replacing the decaying wooden canopy, …
