Electronic Precinct - February 1996

The course is unusual in that it is a collaboration between the engineering department at the University of Manchester and the Department of Civil Engineering at Liverpool. Manchester was the base for the course in the early years, from 1970 to 1973 although both departments contributed more or less equally to the teaching. Students were recruited by both departments and registered between the two Universities in an early example of inter-university, inter-faculty and inter-department co-operation. The early courses provided a unique educational environment to civil engineers returning from industry, with an emphasis on engineering case histories, economics, finance and project management and legal problems, as well as off-shore foundation engineering and off-shore structural design.

After 1974 the course base alternated year upon year between Manchester and Liverpool, with lecturing staff travelling between the two Universities. In 1984 Liverpool became the permanent base of the course but Manchester staff continued to make a contribution. In 1987 European and Erasmus students began to add their distinctive flavour to the course, following an academic linkage between the Civil Engineering Department at Liverpool and that at the University of Thessaloniki in Greece. Today there are ten European Universities united in the department's Erasmus network with students travelling to Liverpool from Greece, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Spain, France and Eire. Further extension will give mechanical engineering students access to the course in 1998.

Over three hundred students have graduated from the course and they have been involved in some of the most significant developments in Maritime Civil Engineering including the Morecombe Bay Gas Field Development, the Thames Barrier, the Severn and Mersey Tidal Power Schemes, the Danish Great Belt Bridge, the design of North Sea Oil production platforms and sub-sea pipelines, extensions to Barcelona Harbour, sewage outfall problems to Sydney Harbour and the new Hong Kong Airport. Other graduates now run major international consulting engineering companies in the UK and abroad offering specialist maritime services to the off-shore oil industry and the port and harbour industry as well as to the dredging industry and other firms of consulting engineers.

Professor Brian O'Connor, who has been involved in the course since it was established, said this course is unique in the UK and its only serious competitor in Europe is the international course in Holland which is associated with the University of Delft. Those who have been associated with the course over the last twenty five years can be proud of the contribution they have made to UK industry as well as to countries abroad.prec7.bhs