In Britain, the 1960s are widely regarded as the decisive decade for the postwar expansion of British universities. Prominently marked by the publication of the Robbins Report on Higher Education in 1963, this period saw a significant increase in the number of universities, full-time university students, and public expenditure per student. Paradoxically, seven new ‘plateglass’ universities had already been approved by 1961, the year the Robbins Committee was set up, while university expansion after 1963 focussed on the upgrading of existing institutions to independent universities. This paper uses previously unexamined documents in the UK National Archives to analyse the debates that informed the governmental decisions about founding seven new universities in Brighton (Sussex), Norwich (East Anglia), York, Canterbury (Kent), Colchester (Essex), Coventry (Warwick) and Lancaster from 1958 to 1961. Particular attention is being devoted to the geographies of this process by examining first, how the government’s locational decisions changed the geography of both UK higher education and wider society; and second, to what extent geographers and geographical knowledge contributed to public debate and governmental policy about British university expansion before the publication of the Robbins Report.