The University of Buckingham is a private university in the UK who, quite legitimately, condense the 3 year BA/BSc to 2 years with no significant breaks. The majority of staff there are pretty much unemployable anywhere else because they have no research profile, but I've never heard anything bad about the quality of their undergraduate teaching.
Workload is an interesting question. I can only speak from my own experience. As an undergraduate doing aero-eng 20+ years ago I was averaging around a 50 hour week. This (after 5 good A levels, well okay, 4 good ones and one bad one) earned me a 2:2. Yes, I did my fair share of wenching and drinking at the time as well! After all, at that stage of life, you work, sleep, and have fun!
Years later I became a university lecturer (also teaching aero-eng). I was reckoned to be reasonably good at it, and still do a little bit. The workload was quite staggering - I *mostly* managed to avoid working weekends, but not always - the rest of the time about a 60 hour week was pretty normal, occasionally peaking to nearer 80. Students were, as you'd expect, pretty variable - but the ones actually getting anywhere were also putting 50+ hours per week in and many postgrads failed miserably to cope at-all, particularly if they had come from overseas and had no concept of independent study (rather than memorise and examine in the US / asian model).
As a lecturer I was entitled to 6 weeks leave a year. I don't think that I ever took my full allowance, nor did any of the other good people. Stroll around most University engineering departments about 7pm and you'll find about half the offices still occupied.
On the other hand, when I was an undergrad, I knew some utterly bone idle (mostly humanities) students putting a few hours a day in and spending the rest of their time in the bar or at various hobbies, and I also have seen a few lecturers whilst doing the job myself who did take a holiday through the summer instead of working on research and course management. Their colleagues know who they are, and they are generally totally unpromotable. Sadly, not many of them get sacked either, but they quietly get sidelined away from anything considered important and usually teach the unwanted basic theory courses and get sidelined into managing the crap jobs like exam supervision. If they fail to publish enough research papers, then they *might* get let go - weeding out poor university lecturers after they've finished their probation is very hard sadly.
G