I was with my friends from the redbrick university, and we were playing the new university (formerly the poly) just down the road.

But for years, Liverpool's Victoria Building which gave the term "redbrick university" to the language was more akin to another familiar phrase: white elephant.

Ms Penlington added that there had been no complaint from the University of Birmingham about BCU's name change and, in fact, the redbrick university had been consulted in the process.

Only a few weeks ago they were overcome with joy that he had been accepted for a redbrick university.

The grade II gothic revival Victoria Building, on Brownlow Hill, inspired the term 'redbrick university' which became synonymous with the late 19th century civic universities.

The AUT, which represents redbrick university lecturers, is being supported by NATFHE, which represents newer institutions.

The AUT, which represents redbrick university lecturers, is involved in a national campaign against what it claims is a "40 per cent real-term drop" in pay over 20 years.

It is said that we have more trees per square mile than any other city in Europe, and from some vantage points - the top floor of what used to be the BBC's Pebble Mill headquarters, for instance - the redbrick university, with its Italianate campanile, rises out of a sea of green like some Tuscan hill town.

At a dinner tonight500 alumnae will gather in the Great Hall of the redbrick university and celebrate the pounds 20 million expansion plans that will see the Birmingham Business School move into University House - a grade II listed building adjacent to the campus and a former student hall of residence.

Managers believe they are over the worst of the pain associated with emerging from being the UK's first redbrick university into a modernthinking institution.

'Going to an old redbrick university to study Ancient History and Archaeology just wasn't the sort of thing people at my school did.

Not, however, the smug two-page missive from someone else telling me the daughter won a place at a redbrick university ("She is having a wonderful time and with her bubbly personality, of course, she is incredibly popular"), the son is an academic marvel ("I don't know where he gets his brains from!"), the husband is a business genius who now controls a global empire ("I'm so proud of him!") and that the wife has so many interests she never sits still ("I'm such an active person, so I love it!").

At each end of the exhibition, there is a trompe l'oeil floor-to-ceilingphoto that conjures up the endlessness of the tunnel complex: at the start, it shows a particle accelerator stretching out into the distance, and at the end it shows a similarly long corridor, reminiscent of many a redbrick university. These convey the vastness and even the ordinariness of it all.