The 1960s plate glass universities were born restless. Sussex, Essex, York, Lancaster, East Anglia, Kent, Warwick – they were meant to be different, experimental, and challenging, in both research and teaching. They rejected Oxbridge’s dreaming spires and redbrick’s civic solidity for something rawer – brutalist concrete, interdisciplinary ambition, a self-conscious radicalism. Sixty years on, that generation of institutions faces an identity crisis.