What should a campus be?

Director of Campus Innovation: Masterplanning, Asset Management & Sustainability Jen Wilson discusses a collaborative approach to reimagining our campus.

Like many universities, Leeds has spent 50 years planning and developing our campus in largely the same way. But the sector, and our climate, is at a point where that approach no longer works.

Campus Reimagined is about giving ourselves permission to step back and ask: what should a campus be in an era of international learning and research partnerships, hybrid work and fast-paced technological advancement?

An excellent campus experience

Feedback and data shows that our campus doesn’t consistently serve the different ways we study, work and collaborate. Our spaces don’t always deliver a good experience for students, or the staff who support them.

Meanwhile, UK higher education faces unprecedented cultural, political and economic challenges, and new expectations from students.

Reimagining the campus is also driven by the need to respond to the climate and nature crises and to adapt to greater rainfall and higher temperatures in Leeds.

The way we plan, manage and use our campus needs to change to secure long-term sustainability, enable our University to meet these challenges, and ultimately deliver an excellent campus experience that enables our students to thrive here.

Your ideas, your campus

Campus Reimagined has been actively engaging with our diverse community, seeking challenge and collaboration to shape the masterplan framework. We simply can’t solve placemaking, belonging or built environment challenges on our own.

Together, we’re testing assumptions about what a “good campus experience” is – what absolutely should be on campus, what creates belonging, and how we can use space far more efficiently. This means more repurposing and adaptation, not defaulting to new build solutions.

Feedback from over 5,000 staff and students who attended Campus Reimagined Live! events in 2025 and 2026 has been brought together with ideas shared via email, activities and workshops, to help shape our masterplan framework – the principles which will guide how we plan, develop and manage campus over the next 15 years and beyond.

The University in the city

A vibrant, expanding city is a big advantage for us. New development brings vibrancy, footfall and economic activity, all of which make Leeds an attractive place for students to study and, critically, for graduates to stay. Around a third of our graduates remain in Leeds, so seeing more companies move here from London, and choose Leeds over other regional cities, is fantastic.

Leeds City Council are hugely collaborative and future-focused, and the conversations we have with them are essential for shaping how the city evolves and how we integrate with it.

There are also challenges. Much of the growth is concentrated on the South Bank and Wellington Place, which is physically quite a distance from our University. It raises questions about connectivity and whether we should work harder to bring activity onto campus or be more deliberate about how our estate links with those emerging areas.

The University works with a huge range of city partners – in arts and culture, financial services firms, and more, whether through research, teaching or other collaborations. These relationships also raise practical considerations: do we have the right types of collaboration space on campus? Should students go to businesses rather than the other way around?

Our masterplan framework will draw on feedback from students, staff and the wider community, as well as research conducted by our expert masterplanners, to consider how our campus could respond to these questions.

What’s next?

We’ll continue to provide regular updates on emerging principles for our future campus, before sharing the agreed masterplan framework later this year.

Planning and development will continue to be shaped by our community. You can share your thoughts and ask us anything at [email protected], or use the online form if you wish to be anonymous.

Personally, I’m particularly excited about emerging opportunities to showcase outstanding work on campus.

So much brilliant activity happens on campus but is tucked away. I want us to bring that activity to the public-facing and ground floors of campus where it’s visible, inviting and clearly part of the city.

You can’t just build a space and assume it will thrive, but with time and the right approach, I see a future where our cultural, academic and innovation strengths are on display, part of the fabric of Leeds.