‘If I think about what this means, I want to cry’: what happens when a city loses its university?

Nathan Doucette-Chiddicks, 23, followed his mum, who was one of the campus’s first students, to do a nursing degree there Photograph: The Guardian

The seaside city of Southend-on-Sea, on England’s east coast, looks grey on a winter afternoon in term-time. Its high street, bordering the university campus, is sparsely populated with market stalls, vape shops and discount retailers, and feels unusually quiet.

“There used to be lots of shops, restaurants and youth clubs around here,” says 23-year-old Nathan Doucette-Chiddicks. Now, the city is about to lose something else that it can scarcely do without.