UNIVERSITIES

Birkbeck

Birkbeck provides courses that enable people to study part-time for a University of London degree.

George Birkbeck studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In 1800 he was appointed by the Andersonian Institute in Glasgow to teach natural philosophy. He gave lectures on the mechanical arts that were open to the public. These proved to be very popular. He moved to London in order to establish himself as a physician. He convened a meeting at The Crown & Anchor Tavern on the Strand that was attended by 2000 people. It led to the foundation of the London Mechanics Institute.

In 1830 the Institute admitted its first women students. In 1858 the ratification of the University of London's charter enabled the Institute's students to sit for the university s examinations. Eight years later the Institute changed its name to the Birkbeck Literary & Scientific Institution. In 1885 the Institution moved into Bream Buildings on Fetter Lane. This relocation was made possible by the generosity of Francis Ravenscroft of Ede & Ravenscroft, the robe-making firm. The name Birkbeck College was adopted in 1907. In 1920 it became a constituent college of the university.

Six years later a royal charter was conferred upon the College. In 1952 it moved to its present-day Malet Street site.

Location: Malet Street, WC1E 7HX (orange, red)

Website: www.bbk.ac.uk

City University

Location: Northampton Square, EC1V 0HB (red, brown)

Website: www.city.ac.uk

Goldsmiths' College

Location: 8 Lewisham Way, SE14 6NW

Website: www.gold.ac.uk

Graduate Proportion

In 2012 it was reputed that about twice as many people in London had degrees than in the rest of Britain. The average resident of a council house in London was more likely to have a degree than the average person on Merseyside.

Heythrop College

Heythrop College is the Roman Catholic college of the University of London. The institution offers courses in the areas of theology, philosophy, and psychology. It derives its name from Heythrop, an Oxfordshire country house that belonged to Talbot family for almost two centuries. The estate was purchased in 1697 by the 1^st Duke of Shrewsbury. In 1679 his grace, then the 12^th earl, had converted from his ancestral Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism. He died without issue, therefore, the family earldom passed to a junior, Roman Catholic branch of the Talbots.

At the start of the 17^thC sectarian legislation made it virtually treason for an Englishman to train to become a Roman Catholic priest. In 1612 a sum of 34,000 scudi was transferred to the Superior General of the Jesuit Order by an anonymous English nobleman who was probably the future 9^th Earl of Shrewsbury. This provided the financial means to establish a Jesuit College to educate Englishmen for the priesthood. Initially, this institution opened in Louvain but in 1626 it relocated to Li ge.

In 1773 Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Order of Jesuits. However, the organisation continued to exist because the rulers of Russia and Prussia refused to acknowledge the validity of the papal edict. The Bishop of Li ge was sympathetic to the Order and allowed the College to continue on a de facto basis as the Li ge Academy. One of the side-effects of the French Revolution was to make Britain a society that was far more tolerant of Roman Catholicism than it had been. In 1794 an advancing French army prompted the Academy to migrate to England. It became established in Stonyhurst, the Lancashire country house of a landowner who had been educated by the Order. In 1814 Pope Pius VII reversed the suppression and the Jesuits were formally reconstituted.

In 1836 the University of London was founded. Four years later Stonyhurst was granted the right to prepare students for London degrees. It became known as St Mary's Hall. In 1848 St Beuno's was established in North Wales as a satellite to it (it was there that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins trained for the priesthood). In 1923 the two institutions were reunited at Heythrop. (The Oxfordshire country house had burned down in 1831. The 19^th earl had sold the estate in 1870.)

In 1970 Heythrop College moved to No. 11 Cavendish Square.¹ The following year it was granted a royal charter and became a constituent college of the University of London. As such, it ceased to be a Jesuit institution although the Order maintains a minority presence upon its governing body. In 1993 the College moved into its present home in Kensington Square. In 2019 the college left the university federation and ceased operation. It was first time since 1265 that an institution of higher education had closed in England.

Location: 24 Kensington Square, W8 5HH (blue, purple)

11 Cavendish Square, W1G 0AN (blue, red)

Website: www.heythropassociation.org www.beunos.com www.warnerleisurehotels.co.uk/hotels/heythrop-park-hotel

¹. No. 11 Cavendish Square had been bought by the Convent of the Holy Child of Jesus in 1883.

Imperial College

The Royal College of Science (founded in 1845), the Royal School of Mines (1851), and the City & Guilds College (1878) were provided with homes on land in South Kensington that was bought with surplus funds that had been generated by the Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1907 the three institutions federated with one another and received a royal charter that established Imperial College as their supervisory body. The following year Imperial became a college of the University of London. In 1988 St Mary's Hospital Medical School (1854) became the fourth constituent college of the now Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine. Other medical colleges and research institutes did likewise. In 2007 the College seceded from the University of London.

In 2007 one Brian May submitted his doctoral dissertation on interplanetary dust clouds. This was handed in thirty years later than had been intended. He had been otherwise occupied.¹

Location: Imperial College Road, SW7 2AZ (purple, red)

Website: www.imperial.ac.uk

¹. Being the guitarist with the band Queen.

T.H. Huxley

T.H. Huxley was the great advocate of Darwinianism. In 1854 he was appointed as a lecturer on natural history at the Royal School of Mines. There were distinct parallels between his career and that of Charles Darwin. Both men circumnavigated the globe on scientific expeditions and thus witnessed personally both its similarities and its diversities. Both were experts on crustaceans. In trying to classify his finds, Huxley was drawn down many of the conceptual pathways that Darwin had himself followed while aboard The Beagle.

It was Huxley who had the great public debate on evolution in Oxford with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860. (During it, the cleric inquired as to whether Huxley was descended from the apes on his father's side of the family or his mother s.)

Huxley s Man's Place In Nature (1863) was an anthropological reworking of Darwinism. The book contained the illustration of the procession of skeletons that proceed from a small, stooped primate to an upright man; it is an image which is now so deeply embedded in the modern world's visual culture that it has come to seem to be almost without origin.

Huxley s belief in the theory did not extend to systematically endorsing all of its implications. He refused to support social Darwinism as the handmaiden of racialism, and he was aware of how intellectually barren Darwin's materialism was at heart.

Location: 16 Bracknell Gardens, NW3 7EB

King's College

University College was set up outside the fold of the Church of England, which until then had monopolised higher education in England. Its foundation prompted a public meeting that led to the establishment in 1828 of King's College as an Anglican institution of higher education in London. Three years later, the college was granted a royal charter.

In 1849 King's College started mounting evening classes. Among those who attended them was the writer Thomas Hardy.

In 1908 King's College became a college of the University of London.

Location: Strand, WC2R 2LS (orange, pink)

Website: www.kcl.ac.uk

The London School of Economics & Political Science

The London School of Economics & Political Science (the L.S.E.) is devoted to economics and the social sciences. In 1894 Henry Hunt Hutchinson, a member of the Fabian Society, committed suicide. His will directed that his trustees - who included Sidney Webb - should use the residue of his estate for socially progressive purposes. The following year the London School of Economics opened at No. 9 John Adam Street, Adelphi, with Webb as its inaugural Chairman. In 1900 the School became a college of the University of London. Two years later it moved to its present site in Clare Market.¹

In 1967 student unrest at the L.S.E. was triggered after it was announced that Water Adams, the former Principal of the University College of Rhodesia, had been appointed to be the School's next Director. The legal academics John Griffith and Professor (Kenneth) Bill Wedderburn [Lord Wedderburn] (1927-2012) were sympathetic to the protesting students. This led the pair to be dubbed the professors of law and disorder .

In 2004 Sir Howard Davies, the Director of L.S.E., reviewed a copy of Michael Adams's Slayer Slang: A Buffy The Vampire Slayer Lexicon for The Times Higher Education Supplement. The knight's conclusion was that Buffy should be given a five-year research contract.

Location: 9 John Adam Street, WC2N 6HT (orange, turquoise)

Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE (blue, brown)

Website: www.lse.ac.uk

¹. The London School of Economics success in attracting American students led to the quip that L.S.E. stands for Let's See Europe .

Middlesex University

Location: The Burroughs, Hendon, NW4 4BT

Website: www.mdx.ac.uk

The Open University

Peter Montagnon (1925-2017) had been an army officer and M.I.6 agent before joining the B.B.C. in the late 1950s. He became a documentary maker. In 1963 he wrote to Peter Shore, who was then a member of the Labour Party's research department, proposing a university of the air . In the late 1960s Montagnon and Michael Gill directed Civilisation, a thirteen-part series about Western culture that was presented by Sir Kenneth Clark. In 1970 the Open University was launched. The Corporation appointed Montagnon to head the O.U. Production Centre, which was based at Alexandra Palace.

In the mid-1980s Keith Joseph tried to close down the Open University. Sir John Horlock (1928-2015), the institution's Vice-Chancellor fought a rigorous rearguard action. As a child he had gained admission to a grammar school but had been left with a clear impression of how a classmate had been humiliated by a teacher for failing. In addition, as an educator of engineers he had developed the clear belief that they should continue learn through the course of their working lives.

Horlock s lobbying was aided by the fact that he was able to point out to many M.P.s that their majorities were smaller than the number of people in their constituencies who were reading for O.U. degrees. William Waldegrave, the Minister for Higher Education, proved to be sympathetic. An enormous letter writing that supported the university became to exert an influence. And Margaret Thatcher recalled that when she had been Education Secretary she had managed to derail Tony Barber's attempt to execute Iain MacLeod's attempt to close down what was regarded as being a Labour project.

Location: 1-11 Hawley Crescent, NW1 8NP (purple, turquoise)

Website: www.open.ac.uk

Queen Mary College

The New Philosophic Institute was founded in Mile End in the 1840s by Barber Beaumont. The Institute developed a relationship with the Drapers Company which administered the Bancroft Hospital, a body that supervised an alms house and a school that were located in the district. The livery company provided financial support for the establishment of the People's Palace Technological Schools in 1887. In 1902 the East London Technical College was founded. The Schools and College merged with one another. In 1934 they assumed the name Queen Mary College (Q.M.C.) and were granted a charter.

In 1965 Simon Gray - who was subsequently to establish himself as a playwright - was appointed as a lecturer at Queen Mary College. The institution featured in his novella Breaking Hearts (1997) as The Dump .

In 1989 Queen Mary's merged with Westfield College taking the name Queen Mary & Westfield College. In 1995 the college merged with both St Bartholomew's Medical School (founded 1662) and the Royal London Medical School (1783). In 2000 it reverted to its Queen Mary College moniker.

Location: 327 Mile End Road, E1 4NS

Website: www.qmul.ac.uk https://thedrapers.co.uk/education

Roehampton University

Location: Roehampton Lane, SW15 5PH

Website: https://www.roehampton.ac.uk

The School of Oriental & African Studies

The School of Oriental & African Studies (S.O.A.S.) offers courses that pertain to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The School of Oriental Studies was founded in 1916 at No. 2 Finsbury Circus. Its principal purpose was to train colonial officials to run the British Empire. The institution was granted a royal charter the same year. In 1938 both its name and its ambit were extended to Africa. Three years later it moved to its present Thornhaugh Street site.

During the post-Second World War era Britain swiftly shed its empire. By then, the School had developed an institutional momentum of its own.

Location: Thornhaugh Street, WC1H 0XG (orange, yellow)

See Also: JAMES BOND MOVIES

Website: www.soas.ac.uk

University College

In 1825 The Times newspaper published an open letter from the poet Thomas Campbell to the lawyer and politician Henry Brougham that called for the creation of a university in London. The latter proved to be responsive and set to work with John Mill. The following year University College (U.C.L.) was founded as London University, a secular institution; this led to its being dubbed both the Cockney College and the Godless Institution on Gower Street . It was the first English higher education body to admit non-Anglicans. Its founders actions were in part informed by a paper that had been written by their associate the social theorist Jeremy Bentham had written. The college buildings were designed by the architect William Wilkins, who during the early part of his career had been associated with reactionary socio-political elements but who had become more progressive in his outlook during his later years.

In 1836 London University and King's College London formed a federal association with one another as the University of London, which was granted a royal charter. London University changed its name to the University College. In 1878 the College admitted women on the same terms as men.

In 1977 University College was granted a royal charter. This restored its legal independence. In 2005 the College's charter was amended so that it could award its own degrees.

Location: Gower Street, WC1E 6BT (purple, red)

Website: www.ucl.ac.uk

The University of Greenwich

Location: Old Roval Naval College, Park Row, SE10 9LS

Website: www.gre.ac.uk

The University of London

The University of London moved into rooms in Burlington House in 1853. Five years later certificates of studentship, for those who wished to sit its examinations, were abolished (except in the medical faculty); this meant that anyone could take a degree. In 1866 the University moved to Burlington Gardens. A dozen years later it became the first university in Britain to admit women as candidates for degrees on equal terms with men. In 1912 the University made its first appointment of a woman to a professorial chair.

In 1911 the University of London decided that it should be accommodated in buildings that matched its standing. A site was acquired in Bloomsbury. In 1936 the University moved into Senate House, a building that had been designed by Charles Holden.

Location: 6 Burlington Gardens, W1S 3ET (orange, purple)

Senate House, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU (orange, brown)

Website: https://london.ac.uk

University of Westminster

Location: The Royal Polytechnic Institution, 309 Regent Street, W1B 2HW (blue, turquoise)

Website: www.westminster.ac.uk

David Backhouse 2024