Price coined the neologism Thinkbelt to describe the educational orientation as well as the regional scale of his project, describing it as 'd… a kind of cross between Berkeley in California and a College of Advanced Technology', for twenty thousand students. (13) He hoped that his Potteries Thinkbelt would help to break down the traditional wall between pure and applied science and technology, lure scientists and technologists back to Britain, and help to put the nation at the forefront of advanced technologies. (14)
His plan for the Potteries Thinkbelt was to utilize the abandoned rail network of the Potteries as the infrastructure of his new think tank. Using the technologies of prefabrication and containerized shipping, he designed mobile, rail-mounted classrooms, computer, and data storage modules, laboratories, lecture, and demonstration halls, which would shunt constantly from place to place along the refurbished railway lines.
There were three large transfer areas in the Potteries Thinkbelt. In addition to providing residential Accommodation Towers , social spaces, teaching facilities, and administrative areas, large gantry and radial cranes would handle the rearrangement of variable function mobile units in the Faculty Zone from and to the adjacent rail lines.
His plan defined an interactive network of static and mobile structures, inspired and controlled by emergent computer and information technologies on which new social, economic, and industrial patterns might develop. The mobile learning units were like information quanta, the switches and transfer stations like the logical gateways of a vast computer circuit. The Potteries Thinkbelt defined a new kind of architectural monumentality, not of large object-buildings, but as a vast and dispersed field of discrete objects and disparate events.
