University of Nottingham
The University of Nottingham is a public research university in Nottingham, England. It was founded as University College Nottingham in 1881, and was granted a royal charter as a university in 1948.
Nottingham's main campus, the Jubilee Campus and the main teaching hospital are located within the City of Nottingham, with a number of smaller campuses and sites elsewhere in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Outside the UK, the university has campuses in Semenyih, Malaysia, and Ningbo, China. UK academic operations are organised into five faculties, and the university has more than 46,000 students and 7,000 staff across the UK, China and Malaysia. It had an income of £849.4 million in 2023–24, of which £141.6 million was from research grants and contracts, giving an operating deficit of £17.9 million.Financial Statement 23/24" />
The institution's alumni, staff and former staff have won three Nobel Prizes and a Fields Medal. The university is a member of the Russell Group and the international Universitas 21 network.
History
Founding
The University of Nottingham traces its origins to both the founding of an adult education school in 1798, and the University Extension Lectures inaugurated by the University of Cambridge in 1873, which were launched at Nottingham before expanding to other posts of the country. However, the foundation of the university is generally regarded as being the establishment of University College Nottingham, in 1881 as a college preparing students for examinations of the University of London.In 1875, an anonymous donor provided £10,000 to establish the work of the Adult Education School and Cambridge Extension Lectures on a permanent basis, and the Corporation of Nottingham agreed to erect and maintain a building for this purpose and to provide funds to supply the instruction.
The foundation stone of the college was duly laid in 1877 by the former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and the college's neo-gothic building on Shakespeare Street was formally opened on 30 July 1881 by Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, with the college admitting its first students that autumn In 1881, there were four professors – of Literature, Physics, Chemistry and Natural Science. New departments and chairs quickly followed: Engineering in 1884, Classics combined with Philosophy in 1893, French in 1897 and Education in 1905; in 1905 the combined Department of Physics and Mathematics became two separate entities; in 1911 Departments of English and Mining were created, in 1912, Economics, and Geology combined with Geography; History in 1914, Adult Education in 1923 and Pharmacy in 1925. The university college was part of the Borough of Nottingham, under the town clerk's department, until it was incorporated by royal charter in 1903. While this made it formally independent, there was almost complete overlap between the city council and the court of governors.
Development
Following the first world war, the university college's leadership proposed the creation of a federal East Midlands University, taking in University College Nottingham, University College Leicester, Loughborough College, and other colleges in Lincoln, Derby and Northampton. A charter was drawn up for the federal university but the proposed dominance of Nottingham led to opposition from Leicester in 1923, and in 1927 the proposal was dropped in favour of Nottingham pursuing university status on its own.The university college underwent significant expansion in the 1920s, when it moved from the centre of Nottingham to a large campus on the city's outskirts. The new campus, called University Park, was completed in 1928, and financed by an endowment fund, public contributions, and the generosity of Sir Jesse Boot who presented to the City of Nottingham in 1921. Boot and his fellow benefactors sought to establish an "elite seat of learning" committed to widening participation, and hoped that the move would solve the problems facing University College Nottingham, in its restricted building on Shakespeare Street. Boot stipulated that, whilst part of the Highfields site, lying south-west of the city, should be devoted to the university college, the rest should provide a place of recreation for the residents of the city, and, by the end of the decade, the landscaping of the lake and public park adjoining University Boulevard was completed. The original university college building on Shakespeare Street in central Nottingham, known as the Arkwright Building, now forms part of Nottingham Trent University's City Campus.
University College Nottingham was initially accommodated within the Trent Building, an imposing white limestone structure with a distinctive clock tower, designed by Morley Horder, and formally opened by King George V on 10 July 1928. During this period of development, Nottingham attracted high-profile visiting speakers, including Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells, and Mahatma Gandhi. The blackboard used by Einstein for his lecture at Nottingham is still on display in the Physics department.
Apart from its physical transfer to surroundings that could not be more different from its original home, the college made few developments between the wars. The Department of Slavonic Languages was established in 1933, the teaching of Russian having been introduced in 1916. In 1933–34, the departments of Electrical Engineering, Zoology and Geography, which had been combined with other subjects, were made independent; and in 1938 a supplemental charter provided for a much wider representation on the governing body. However, further advances were delayed by the outbreak of war in 1939.
University status
Until 1948, students of University College Nottingham students sat exams from and were awarded degrees by the University of London. In 1948, the institution was granted a royal charter as the University of Nottingham, giving it university status and the power to confer its own degrees.In the 1940s, the Midlands Agricultural and Dairy College at Sutton Bonington merged with the university as the School of Agriculture, and in 1956 the Portland Building was completed to complement the Trent Building. In 1970, the university established the UK's first new medical school of the 20th century.
Modern day
In 1999, Jubilee Campus was opened on the former site of the Raleigh Bicycle Company, one mile away from the University Park Campus. Nottingham then began to expand overseas, opening campuses in Malaysia and in China in 1999 and 2004 respectively. In 2005, the King's Meadow Campus opened near University Park.In 2008, the "Nottingham Two", a member of staff and a postgraduate student at the university, were detained for under the Terrorism Act 2000 after the university reported finding an edited version of the al-Qaeda training manual the student was using for his research. Subsequently, the teaching of terrorism studies was dropped at the university.
The university's student rag, Karnival, was suspended in 2016 to ensure compliance with the Charities Act 2016, particularly in the safeguarding of participants in fundraising activities and the people they interacted with. It was reinstated later that year, but an investigation the following year, 2017, determined that "RAG raids" had breached the safeguarding requirements and health and safety policies on multiple occasions, leading the students' union executive to ban these activities.
In the 2020–21 academic year, students of the University of Nottingham organised large-scale campaigns for wider academic, welfare, and financial support for students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2021, the university briefly blocked the appointment of a Catholic chaplain due to his social media posts on abortion and euthanasia. The university maintained that their concern was not about the priest's views but the way they had been expressed. Following discussions, the priest was able to take up the post the following month.
In November 2023, the University of Nottingham became the first university in the UK to be awarded an institutional Athena SWAN Gold Award for its commitment to advancing gender equality.
In January 2025, the university announced plans to sell its King's Meadow Campus. In November 2025, the university announced that it would permanently suspend 16 courses, including all modern language and music courses, for new students, and that it intended to sell its Castle Meadow Campus. It cited "significant financial challenges" due to decreasing numbers of students, especially international students, as the reason.
Campuses
UK campuses
University Park Campus
, to the west of Nottingham city centre, is the main campus of the University of Nottingham. Set around its lake and clock-tower and with extensive parkland greenery, University Park has won several awards for its architecture and landscaping, and was claimed to be the greenest campus in the country in 2009 after winning seven Green Flag Awards.At the south entrance to the main campus, in Highfields Park, lies the Lakeside Arts Centre, the university's public arts facility and performance space. The D.H. Lawrence Pavilion houses a range of cultural facilities, including a 225 capacity theatre space, a series of craft cabinets, the Weston Gallery, the Wallner gallery, which exists as a platform for local and regional artists, and a series of visual arts, performance and hospitality spaces. Other nearby facilities include the Djanogly Art Gallery, Recital Hall and Theatre, which in the past have hosted recordings and broadcasts by BBC Radio 3, local community theatre partnerships, contemporary art exhibitions, and cultural festivals.
Jubilee Campus
The Jubilee Campus, designed by Sir Michael Hopkins, was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999, and is approximately from University Park. The campus houses the schools of education and computer science, along with the Nottingham University Business School. The site is also the home of the National College for School Leadership. A second building for the business school was opened by Lord Sainsbury in 2004.The environmentally friendly nature of the campus and its buildings have been a factor in the awards that it has received, including the Millennium Marque Award for Environmental Excellence, the British Construction Industry Building Project of the Year, the RIBA Journal Sustainability Award, and the Civic Trust Award for Sustainability. The Jubilee Campus was also commended by the Energy Globe Award judges in 2005. The GlaxoSmithKline Carbon Neutral Laboratory is part of the university's school of chemistry and was the UK's first carbon neutral laboratory.
On 12 September 2014 a large fire broke out during its construction, resulting in the official opening being delayed until 2017.
The campus is distinct for its modern and unique architecture, culminating in Aspire, a tall artistic structure that was the tallest freestanding work of art in the UK. However, not all of the buildings have been well received, with the Amenities Building and YANG Fujia Building being labelled the second worst new architectural design in Britain in the 2009 Carbuncle Cup.