When the vice chancellor of London Metropolitan University said he was considering banning the sale of alcohol on parts of campus back in 2012, he was met with an unexpected backlash – from Muslim students.

Professor Malcolm Gillies said he wanted to make alcohol-free spaces because drinking alcohol was an “immoral experience for a high percentage of our students”, a fifth of whom were Muslim.

But campus drinking culture was so entrenched that Muslim students feared the policy would make other students resent them. The vice president of the student union told the Evening Standard that the ban would be “catastrophic” and “divide the student body”. The idea was canned.

Fast-forward 12 years and the world has undergone a sea change.

University drinking culture is in such dramatic decline that student union bars across the country are being forced to close because they do not make money.

Gen Z is anxious and health conscious, the population of students who do not drink for religious reasons has swelled and almost all students are squeezed financially. A decline in boozing for all of these reasons has forced many student bars to reinvent themselves.

“I see global alcohol halving in size in the next 50 years,” says Ed Gerard, who left his role as head of the alcoholic drinks department at Harrods to become chief commercial officer at the alcohol-free drinks brand Mocktails in 2018.

Amongst the student cohort, consumption will fall at an even steeper rate, perhaps by 75pc over the same period, Gerard predicts. “I think it is not going to be too dissimilar to what happened to the tobacco industry.”

At the University of Bradford, sales were so low at the student union bar that the institution has just spent £2m transforming one of its student bars into an alcohol-free cafe, which opened in September.

Instead of vodka Red Bulls, there are smoothies, bubble tea and shuffleboard. Alcohol is still available in a bar downstairs but this now also offers mocktails.

“The main driver was that the bars here were not making money,” says Aleem Bashir, the chief executive of the university’s student union. Takings were so slim the union bar had started asking student groups to pay for staff if they hosted events there.

The cohort of students who drink is smaller at Bradford because a large proportion of students are part of ethnic minorities who do not drink, says Bashir. Roughly half are Muslim. There is also a large contingent of Christians from Nigeria, who also don’t drink.

But even the traditional boozy crowds have massively dialled back. At the student union’s annual awards dinner, which included the sports society crowd, the 350 attendees spent less than £500 between them at the bar, which had set a minimum tab spend. “We didn’t get our deposit back, and these were the heavy drinkers,” says Bashir.

The university consulted with student groups, including both sports clubs and religious societies, and the message was that they wanted an alcohol-free space. Since it opened, sales at the cafe have already exceeded those at the old bar.

Bradford was not the first. Abertay University in Dundee closed its student union bar in 2019 and turned it into an events space after sales plunged by two thirds. The University of Aberdeen turned its Union Brew Bar into a coffee shop in 2022 after its takings totalled little more than £2,000 over the four months it was open in 2020-21.

Many universities, including the University of Surrey and the University of Exeter, have also started offering alcohol-free accommodation. Of 89 universities that provide accommodation and responded to a 2022 Freedom of Information request 28 said they offered housing where alcohol is banned.

The University of St Andrews, which was one of the first to do so in 2015, says demand for this type of room has climbed every year and is so high the university is expanding availability.

Campus drinking is no longer celebrated in the way that it was.

Universities in Scotland, including Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, this year rebranded freshers’ week as “Welcome Week”, with yoga classes and cake-decorating sessions instead of organised pub crawls. Numerous institutions have explicitly alcohol-free clubs, such as Queen Mary University’s Sober Socials Society.

As a nation, Britain is drinking less. Of those who do drink, 46pc generally consume no more than two units at a time, up from 43pc in 2023, according to Drinkaware. Nine in 10 are using at least one technique to reduce their drinking.

The biggest revolution is taking place amongst the young. Since 2018, the share of 18 to 34-year-olds who said they never binge-drink has surged from 22pc to 31pc.