Gibbet Hill Road, a thoroughfare that roughly runs through the middle of the main campus of the University of Warwick, has a peculiar feature.
If you stand outside Warwick Business School, and walk across Gibbet Hill Road to the Department of Physics building, you have passed from the county of Warwickshire to the unitary authority of Coventry. No other UK campus contains a county boundary, something that is bound to come up in the Christmas quiz.
The road and the boundary bisect the campus into two roughly equal halves – with the notable side effect that a student with a room in the Rootes hall of residence lives in a different local authority to a peer living across the road in Cryfield.
This has a notable impact on UK migration figures, to the extent that the Office for National Statistics makes a regular assessment of risk concerning the quality and availability of data from the University of Warwick accommodation service. The last one was in 2019 – if this is in your Christmas quiz, it’s probably me that is running it.
