University of Liverpool
The University of Liverpool is a public research university in Liverpool, England. Founded in 1881 as University College Liverpool and affiliated with Victoria University in 1884, it received a royal charter from King Edward VII in 1903, thereby attaining the authority to award degrees independently. The university holds and operates assets on the National Heritage List, such as the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, the Ness Botanic Gardens, and the Victoria Gallery & Museum.
Organised into three faculties divided by 35 schools and departments, the university offers more than 230 first degree courses across 103 subjects. It is a founding member of the Russell Group, and the research intensive association of universities in Northern England, the N8 Group. The phrase "redbrick university" was inspired by the Victoria Building; thus, the university claims to be the original redbrick university, and uses it in its brand tagline.
Liverpool is the first UK university to establish departments in oceanography, civic design, architecture, and biochemistry, and also the first to establish an independent university campus in Suzhou, China, known as Xi'an Jiaotong–Liverpool University. The university also founded the University of Liverpool Mathematics School, a specialist A-level maths school, located on the university campus. The university launched a second international campus in Bengaluru, India. The university has the ninth-largest endowment of any university in the UK, and in 2024/25, it had an income of £722.9 million, of which £126.2 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £723.5 million.Financial Statement 24/25"/>
As of 2024, the university holds four academic fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences and one of the British Academy. Ten Nobel Prize laureates have been affiliated with the University of Liverpool as alumni or academic staff, with notable alumni leading fields in medicine, law, business, engineering, the arts, politics, and technology. Graduates of the university are styled with the post-nominal letters, Lpool, to indicate the institution.
History
University College Liverpool
The university was established in 1881 as College Liverpool, admitting its first students in 1882. In 1884, it became part of the federal Victoria University. In 1894 Oliver Lodge, a professor at the university, made the world's first public radio transmission and two years later took the first surgical X-ray in the United Kingdom. The Liverpool University Press was founded in 1899, making it the third-oldest university press in England. Students in this period were awarded external degrees by the University of London.University status
Following a royal charter and an act of Parliament in 1903, it became an independent university with the right to confer its degrees. The next few years saw major developments at the university, including Sir Charles Sherrington's discovery of the synapse and William Blair-Bell's work on chemotherapy in the treatment of cancer. In the 1930s to 1940s, Sir James Chadwick and Sir Joseph Rotblat made major contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. From 1943 to 1966, Allan Downie, Professor of Bacteriology, was involved in the eradication of smallpox.In 1994, the university was a founding member of the Russell Group, a collaboration of twenty leading research-intensive universities, as well as a founding member of the N8 Group in 2004. In the 21st century physicists, engineers and technicians from the University of Liverpool were involved in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, working on two of the four detectors in the LHC.
In 2004, Sylvan Learning, later known as Laureate International Universities, became the worldwide partner for University of Liverpool online. In 2019, it was announced that Kaplan Open Learning, part of Kaplan, Inc., would be the new partner for the University of Liverpool's online programmes. Laureate continued to provide some teaching provision for existing students until 2021.
The university has produced ten Nobel Prize winners, from the fields of science, medicine, economics and peace. The Nobel laureates include the physician Sir Ronald Ross, physicist Charles Barkla, physicist Martin Lewis Perl, the physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, physicist Sir James Chadwick, chemist Sir Robert Robinson, chemist Har Gobind Khorana, physiologist Rodney Porter, economist Ronald Coase and physicist Joseph Rotblat. Sir Ronald Ross was also the first British Nobel laureate in 1902. The university is also associated with Ronald Finn and Sir Cyril Clarke who jointly won the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 1980 and Sir David Weatherall who won the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science in 2010. These Lasker Awards are popularly known as America's Nobels.
Over the 2013/2014 academic year, members of staff took part in numerous strikes after staff were offered a pay rise of 1% which unions equated to a 13% pay cut since 2008. The strikes were supported by both the university's Guild of Students and the National Union of Students. Some students at the university supported the strike, occupying buildings on campus.
Campus and facilities
The university is mainly based around a single urban campus approximately five minutes walk from Liverpool City Centre, at the top of Brownlow Hill and Mount Pleasant. Occupying, it contains 192 non-residential buildings that house 69 lecture theatres, 114 teaching areas, and research facilities.The main site is divided into three faculties: Health and Life Sciences; Humanities and Social Sciences; and Science and Engineering. The Veterinary Teaching Hospital and Ness Botanical Gardens are based on the Wirral Peninsula. There was formerly a marine biology research station at Port Erin on the Isle of Man until it closed in 2006.
Fifty-one residential buildings, on or near the campus, provide 3,385 rooms for students, on a catered or self-catered basis. The centrepiece of the campus remains the university's original red brick building, the Victoria Building. Opened in 1892, it was restored in 2008 as the Victoria Gallery and Museum, completed with a café and activities for school visits.
In 2011 the university made a commitment to invest £660m into the 'Student Experience', £250m of which will reportedly be spent on Student Accommodation. Announced so far have been two large On-Campus halls of residences, new Veterinary Science facilities, and a £10m refurbishment of the Liverpool Guild of Students. New Central Teaching Laboratories for physics, earth sciences, chemistry and archaeology were opened in autumn 2012.
In 2013, the University of Liverpool opened a satellite campus in Finsbury Square in London, offering a range of professionally focused masters programmes.
Central Teaching Hub
The Central Teaching Hub is a large multi-use building that houses a recently refurbished Lecture Theatre Block and teaching facilities for the Departments of Chemistry and Physics and the School of Environmental Sciences, within the university's Central City Centre Campus. It was completed and officially opened in September 2012 with an estimated project cost of £23m. The main building, the 'Central Teaching Laboratory', is built around a large atrium and houses seven separate laboratories that can accommodate 1,600 students at a time. A flexible teaching space, computing centre, multi-departmental teaching spaces, and communal workspaces can also be found inside. The adjoining University Lecture Block building contains four lecture rooms and further social spaces.Sustainability
In 2008, the University of Liverpool was voted joint seventeenth greenest university in Britain by WWF supported company Green League. This represents an improvement after finishing 55th in the league table the previous year.The position of the university is determined by point allocation in departments such as Transport, Waste management, sustainable procurement and Emissions among other categories; these are then transpired into various awards. Liverpool was awarded the highest achievement possible in Environmental policy, Environmental staff, Environmental audit, Fair trade status, Ethical investment policy and Waste recycled while also scoring points in Carbon emissions, Water recycle and Energy source.
Liverpool was the first among UK universities to develop their desktop computer power management solution, which has been widely adopted by other institutions. The university has subsequently piloted other advanced software approaches further increasing savings. The university has also been at the forefront of using the Condor HTC computing platform in a power saving environment. This software, which makes use of unused computer time for computationally intensive tasks usually results in computers being left turned on. The university has demonstrated an effective solution for this problem using a mixture of Wake-on-LAN and commercial power management software.
The Interdisciplinary Centre for Sustainability Research was established in 2024 to tackle the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Organisation and structure
The university is a research-based university with 33,000 students pursuing over 450 programmes spanning 54 subject areas. It has a broad range of teaching and research in both arts and sciences, and the University of Liverpool School of Medicine established in 1835 is today one of the largest medical schools in the UK. It also has close links to the neighbouring Royal Liverpool University Hospital.The university has a students' union to represent students' interests, known as the Liverpool Guild of Students.
The university previously had a strategic partnership with Laureate Education, a for-profit college collective, for University of Liverpool online degrees. In 2019, the university announced a new partnership with Kaplan Open Learning for delivery of their online degrees.