University of Manchester

The University of Manchester is a public research university in Manchester, England, with its main campus south of the city centre on Oxford Road. It is a red brick university, a product of the civic university movement of the late 19th century. The current institution was formed in 2004 through the merger of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and the Victoria University of Manchester. This merger followed a century of close collaboration between the two institutions.

UMIST traced its origins to the Manchester Mechanics' Institution, founded in 1824. The present University of Manchester regards this date, alongside that of the foundation of the ancestor of the Royal School of Medicine and Surgery—one of the predecessor institutions of the Victoria University of Manchester—as its official foundation year. The founders of the Mechanics' Institution believed that all professions depended, to some extent, on scientific principles. The institute therefore taught working individuals those branches of science relevant to their existing occupations, in the belief that practical application would encourage innovation and advancement within those fields. The Victoria University of Manchester was founded in 1851 as Owens College. Academic research undertaken by the university has been published via the Manchester University Press since 1904.

Manchester is the third-largest university in the United Kingdom by total enrolment and receives over 92,000 undergraduate applications per year, making it the most popular university in the UK by volume of applications. The University of Manchester is a member of the Russell Group, the N8 Group, and the US-based Universities Research Association. The university additionally owns and operates major cultural assets such as the Manchester Museum, the Whitworth art gallery, the John Rylands Library, the Tabley House Collection and the Jodrell Bank Observatory, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university and its predecessor institutions have had 26 Nobel laureates among their past and present students and staff.

History

Origins (1824 to 2004)

The University of Manchester traces its origins to the formation of the Mechanics' Institution in 1824, the distant precursor of UMIST, and its heritage is intertwined with Manchester's identity as the world's first industrial city. The English chemist John Dalton, together with Manchester businessmen and industrialists, founded the institution to ensure that workers might learn the basic principles of science.

John Owens, a textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 (equivalent to some £5.6 million in 2005 prices) to establish a college for the education of men on non-sectarian lines. His trustees founded Owens College in 1851 on a site at the corner of Quay Street and Byrom Street that had once been the home of the philanthropist Richard Cobden and later housed Manchester County Court. The locomotive designer Charles Beyer served as a governor of the college and became its most generous single donor to the extension fund, which raised the capital for the move to a new site and the construction of the main building now known as the John Owens Building. He also campaigned for and helped to fund the chair of engineering, the first applied science department in the north of England. His bequest to the college in 1876, a time of acute financial difficulty, was equivalent to £10 million. Beyer met the entire cost of constructing the Beyer Building to house the biology and geology departments, and his will also endowed chairs in engineering and the Beyer Professorship of Applied Mathematics.

The university possesses a strong German intellectual heritage. The Owens College Extension Movement formulated its plans following a tour of predominantly German universities and polytechnics. Thomas Ashton, a Manchester mill owner and chairman of the extension movement, had studied at Heidelberg University. Sir Henry Roscoe also studied at Heidelberg, under Robert Bunsen, and the two collaborated on research projects for many years. Roscoe championed the German model of research-led teaching that later became the template for the red-brick universities. Charles Beyer had studied at the Dresden Academy Polytechnic. Germans featured prominently on the staff, among them Carl Schorlemmer, Britain's first professor of organic chemistry, and Arthur Schuster, professor of physics. A German church also stood nearby on what is now part of the campus (this church was acquired by the university in 1949 and at a later date became the Stephen Joseph Studio).

In 1873, Owens College moved to new buildings on Oxford Road (then called Oxford Street) in Chorlton-on-Medlock, and from 1880 it was a constituent college of the federal Victoria University. This university, which received its royal charter in 1880, became England's first civic university. Following the independence of Liverpool and Leeds, it was renamed the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903 and absorbed Owens College the following year.

Campus

The university’s main site contains most of its facilities and is often referred to as the campus; however, Manchester is not a campus university in the commonly understood sense. It is situated in the heart of the city, and its buildings are woven into the urban fabric of Manchester, interspersed with non‑university buildings and major thoroughfares.

The campus falls into two parts:

the North Campus, or Sackville Street Campus, centred on Sackville Street

the South Campus, or Oxford Road Campus, centred on Oxford Road

Student accommodation is spread across three residential campuses: the City Campus, adjacent to the academic departments; the Fallowfield Campus, roughly 2 miles (3.2 km) south of the main site; and the Victoria Park Campus, which lies between the City and Fallowfield campuses.

By 2025 the greater part of the former North Campus had been relocated to the Oxford Road Campus, and the Sackville Street site now houses the SISTER regeneration area (formerly ID Manchester). This is a joint venture between Bruntwood SciTech and the University of Manchester, intended to become a £1.7 billion innovation district and a new city‑centre neighbourhood. The Manchester City Council Strategic Regeneration Framework for the site was approved in 2017 and updated in 2023.

Old Quadrangle

The buildings that surround the Old Quadrangle date from the period of Owens College and were designed in a Gothic style by Alfred Waterhouse. The John Owens Building (1873), originally called the Main Building, was the first to be completed; the remaining structures were added over the following thirty years. These include the Beyer Building (1887), the Manchester Museum (1887), the Christie Library (1898) and Whitworth Hall (1902), where the university holds its graduation ceremonies.

Other notable buildings

The University of Manchester estate includes over 30 listed buildings. In addition to the buildings that form the Old Quadrangle, other notable structures on the Oxford Road Campus include the Stephen Joseph Studio, a former German Protestant church, and the Samuel Alexander Building, a grade II listed building erected in 1919 that now houses the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures.

Notable buildings on the Sackville Street Campus include the Sackville Street Building, formerly the UMIST Main Building, which was opened in 1902 by the then Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour. Constructed of Burmantofts terracotta, the building is now Grade II listed. It was extended along Whitworth Street, towards London Road, between 1927 and 1957 by the architects Bradshaw Gass & Hope; the completion of the work was delayed by the economic depression of the 1930s and the Second World War.

Organisation and administration

Faculties and schools

The University of Manchester is divided into three faculties: Biology, Medicine and Health; Science and Engineering; and Humanities.

Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health

The faculty is composed of the School of Biological Sciences, the School of Medical Sciences and the School of Health Sciences.

Biological sciences have been taught at Manchester since the founding of Owens College in 1851. At UMIST, biological teaching and research commenced in 1959 with the establishment of a biochemistry department. The present school, though unitary for teaching purposes, is divided into a number of separate sections for research.

The medical college was founded in 1874 and is one of the largest in the country, training more than 400 medical students in each clinical year and over 350 in the pre‑clinical and phase‑1 years. The university is a founding partner of the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, established to focus high‑end healthcare research in Greater Manchester.

A department of pharmacy was established at the university in 1883, and in 1904 Manchester became the first British university to offer an honours degree in the subject. The School of Pharmacy maintains close links with Manchester Royal Infirmary, UHSM/Wythenshawe and Salford Royal (formerly Hope Hospital), which provide undergraduate students with hospital‑based experience.

The School of Psychological Sciences was one of the five schools that made up the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences. The Victoria University of Manchester was the first university in Britain to appoint a full‑time Professor of Psychology, doing so in 1919. When the present University of Manchester was formed in 2004, the school brought together the Human Communication and Deafness Group (HCD), which had been part of the Department of Psychology, and the Division of Clinical Psychology. The school was divided into three divisions: Psychology, Clinical Psychology, and Audiology and Deafness. T. H. Pear held the Chair of Psychology from 1919 to 1951.

Faculty of Science and Engineering

The Faculty of Science and Engineering is divided into two schools. The School of Engineering comprises the departments of chemical engineering and analytical science, computer science, electrical and electronic engineering and mechanical, aerospace and civil engineering. The School of Natural Sciences consists of the departments of chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, physics and astronomy, materials and mathematics.

The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics brings together the university's astronomy staff in Manchester and the Jodrell Bank Observatory, which occupies rural land near Goostrey, some ten miles (16 km) west of Macclesfield. The observatory's Lovell Telescope is named after Sir Bernard Lovell, a professor at the Victoria University of Manchester who first proposed its construction. Built in the 1950s, it is the third‑largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world.

Academic profile

The University of Manchester is the 3rd largest university in the United Kingdom, after the Open University and University College London. It attracts international students from 160 countries worldwide.

Among the university's most prominent current academics are the computer scientist Steve Furber; the novelist Jeanette Winterson; and the physicist Brian Cox.

Research

The University of Manchester is a major centre for research and a member of the Russell Group of leading British research universities. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, the university was ranked fifth in the United Kingdom for research power and eighth for the grade point average quality of staff submitted among multi‑faculty institutions, placing tenth when specialist institutions were included. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, it had been ranked fifth for research power and fifteenth for the grade point average quality of staff submitted among multi‑faculty institutions, a position that fell to seventeenth when specialist institutions were taken into account. Manchester has the sixth‑largest research income of any English university, behind Oxford, University College London (UCL), Cambridge, Imperial and King's College London, and has been informally described as forming part of a "golden diamond" of research‑intensive UK institutions, a grouping that adds Manchester to the Oxford–Cambridge–London "Golden Triangle".

The university has a strong track record in securing funding from the three principal UK research councils. It is ranked fifth by the EPSRC, seventh by the Medical Research Council (MRC), and first by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). It is also one of the wealthiest universities in the UK in terms of income and interest from endowments; an estimate made in 2008 placed it third, exceeded only by Oxford and Cambridge.

The University of Manchester attracts the highest level of research income from UK industry of any institution in the country. Data published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) show that in 2016–2017 the university received £24,831,000 in research funding from UK industry, commerce and public corporations.

Historically, Manchester has been associated with high scientific achievement: across the university and its constituent former institutions there are 25 Nobel laureates among past and current students and staff, the fourth highest number of any single university in the United Kingdom (after Oxford, Cambridge and UCL) and the ninth highest in Europe. Two of the top ten discoveries made by university academics and researchers—the first working computer and the contraceptive pill—were also made at Manchester, according to an academic poll. The Langworthy Professorship, an endowed chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been held by a succession of academic luminaries, among them Ernest Rutherford (1907–19), Lawrence Bragg (1919–37), Patrick Blackett (1937–53) and, more recently, Konstantin Novoselov—all of whom received the Nobel Prize. In 2013 Andre Geim was appointed to the Regius Professorship in Physics, the only chair of its kind in the United Kingdom.

Student life

Students' Union

The University of Manchester Students' Union is the representative body for students at the university and the largest students' union in the United Kingdom. It was formed through the merger of the UMIST Students' Association and the University of Manchester Union, following the amalgamation of their parent institutions, UMIST and the Victoria University of Manchester, on 1 October 2004.

Unlike many other students' unions in the UK, it does not have a president, but is instead led by an eight-member executive team whose members share joint responsibility.

Sport

The University of Manchester runs its sports clubs through the athletics union, while student societies are administered by the Students' Union.

The university offers more than 80 health and fitness classes, and over 3,000 students are members of the 44 Athletic Union clubs. These clubs cover a wide range of levels and interests. Many of the more popular sports field several university and departmental teams that compete in internal leagues. Among the sports represented are badminton, lacrosse, korfball, dodgeball, field hockey, ice hockey, rugby league, rugby union, football, basketball, fencing, netball, squash, water polo, ultimate and cricket.

The athletic union was formed at Owens College in 1885 from four clubs: rugby, lacrosse, cricket and tennis. A separate women's athletic union was founded in 1901, and the two bodies were amalgamated in 1981. Following the acquisition of the Firs estate in Fallowfield, a sports ground and pavilion were established there. From 1940, the McDougall Centre on Burlington Street also served as a sports centre. Among former students who have achieved Olympic success are Ron Hill, Rowena Sweatman, James Hickman, Cyril Holmes and Harry Whittle.

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