The Old College was the original home of the university in Aberystwyth, opened in 1872 and the first university in Wales (grand total: 26 students; the first female students arrived in 1883). The Penglais campus on the hill (with important outliers at Llanbadarn) is now, with the expansion of the university in the second half of the twentieth century, the main site for teaching. Old College is now largely used for administration, although two major departments, Welsh and Education, still reside there.
In a period of building expansion with the coming of the railway line during the 1860s, it had originally been built as a hotel, but the company went bust before completion and offered it to the recently established university committee. It was a bargain; about £80,000 had already been spent on the building works, and the university got it (though incomplete) for £10,000. But it was still a struggle to get the university up and running. Much of the early funding came from public subscriptions within Wales (it’s clear that getting any aid at all from governments was an extremely difficult task until the mid-1880s), and many of those were very small sums, the “pennies from the people of Wales” as authors (rather sentimentally) put it. But perhaps that had advantages; as a result, they regarded it as their college and were prepared to fight for its survival at the most desperate time after the fire of 1885, and when official policy (and money) would have ignored Aberystwyth in favour of colleges at Cardiff and Bangor.
