Whiteknights Park - Campus

Campus

The University of Reading was given Whiteknights Park in 1947, and today it is the home of the university's administration, most of the academic departments and four halls of residence. The halls of residence (MacKinder, Windsor, Stenton, and Wessex) are all along Whiteknights Road and Upper Redlands Road sides of the campus, with their own vehicular access off those roads and with only pedestrian access to the core of the campus. Two previous halls of residence (Childs and Bridges) have recently closed, and been replaced by two newly built halls (MacKinder and Stenton).

Along the Wilderness Road and Pepper Lane sides of the campus, the campus is screened from the outside by undeveloped woodland and by the Harris Garden, the university's botanical garden. The campus core is therefore only easily visible from outside in the area around the main entrance on the Shinfield Road and the adjacent Elmhurst Road.

The centre of the campus is bisected into two unequal halves by a chain of lakes which are crossed by several pedestrian bridges but with no vehicular link. To the west of the lakes can be found most of the academic departments, catering services, the university administration and the students union. With the exception of a couple of surviving Victorian residences, including Foxhill House, all of these are housed in purpose built buildings dating from the 1950s to the 2000s. The Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, University of Reading Herbarium and the Cole Museum of Zoology are both found in this area.

To the east of the lakes and surrounding conservation meadowland is the Earley Gate area of the campus. The second-world war era buildings here house the Fine Art Department, the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, and various service functions. More recent buildings, dating from the 1990s and 2000s, house the Department of Applied Statistics; the Department of Meteorology; the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development; and the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences. Also in this area can be found the Reading Enterprise Centre, the Science & Technology Centre, the University Atmospheric Observatory, and an NHS Speech and Language Therapy clinic, used by the students and staff of the Department of Clinical Language Sciences.

Although the campus is much closer to the centre of Reading than it is to that of Wokingham, the boundary between the unitary authorities of Reading and Wokingham meanders across the campus in a rather unpredictable fashion. The campus is split about one third to Reading, two thirds to Wokingham.