Cobbled streets and dreaming spires, a typical ancient university city - except its first students arrived only this week

The doors of a new university have opened in Lincolnshire, a mere 663 years after the medieval borough briefly reigned as the only serious competitor to Oxford.

Most of the new university's freshers arriving at the pounds 32m campus in Lincoln were unaware that their 14th century counterparts had seceded from Oxford after a town-and-gown row and decamped to the religious centre of Stamford. With Stamford's medieval curriculum of theology and the philosophies replaced by such modern concerns as management, tourism, criminology and health studies, the new learning centre, the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, aims to attract 4,500 students by the time the project is fully operational in 2000.

Neither Lincoln College, Oxford, nor the public relations team at Lincoln seem to know much about their educational past. With Lincolnshire's freshers about complete their first week in the new era, the historical background appears to have faded in favour of the future.

In 1333, Stamford, then dominated by a Carmelite monastery, after earlier influence from the Benedictine order, graciously welcomed the revolting Oxford students. Peace between Lincolnshire and Oxford was eventually made but the authorities in Oxford appear to have continued to worry about the possibility of another split for centuries. Up until the beginning of the last century, new dons at Oxford were expected to sign contracts specifically banning them from teaching or lecturing at Stamford.

In the early 1960s, with the expansion of university education, Stamford tried to put itself on the academic map but the project failed to attract funding and died. Then in 1990, consultants from the Confederation of British Industry who were looking at the economic prospects for the county advocated that a new university be founded. In 1993 trustees from both the public and private sectors set up the charitable company that has led to the new university becoming a reality. Initially Nottingham Trent University was the academic partner of the Lincolnshire project. However the relationship failed and a new deal was struck with the University of Humberside at Hull. Both Hull and Lincoln will retain separate operational identities in the new institution.

In the first intake, 540 full-time undergraduate students will enjoy the facilities of the new 40-acre campus at the Brayford Pool site in Lincoln city centre. Contamination on the site, a former British Rail yard, cost pounds 2m to clear up.

Recent studies by the Lincolnshire project company and other centres of higher learning suggest that a community of 10,000 students injects pounds 50m injected into a local economy annually. However, the accountants Touche Ross estimate that by 2000 the new university, with around half that number, will generate an annual pounds 40m, in an area where unemployment is above average.

Professor Roger King, Lincoln University's campus vice-chancellor, said: "The pounds 32m needed to get us to this stage has been raised locally. No money has come from the Department for Education and Employment or the Higher education Funding Council."

The Queen will officially open the university next month.