Universiti Manchester

History

The University's history as an academic institution began in 1824 and is closely linked to Manchester's emergence as the world's first industrial city. The English chemist John Dalton, together with Manchester businessmen and industrialists, established the Mechanics' Institute (later to become UMIST) to ensure that workers could learn the basic principles of science. Similarly, John Owens, a Manchester textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 for the purpose of founding a college for the education of males on non-sectarian lines. His trustees established Owens College at Manchester in 1851. It was initially housed in a building, complete with Adam staircase, on the corner of Quay Street and Byrom Street which had been the home of the philanthropist Richard Cobden, and subsequently was to house Manchester County Court. In 1873 it moved to new buildings at Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock and from 1880 it was a constituent college of the federal Victoria University. The university was established and granted a Royal Charter in 1880 to become England's first civic university; it was renamed the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903 and then absorbed Owens College the following year.
By 1905 the two institutions were large and active forces in the area, with the Municipal College of Technology, the forerunner of the later UMIST, forming the Faculty of Technology of the Victoria University of Manchester while continuing as a technical college in parallel with the advanced courses of study in the Faculty.
Before the merger, the University and UMIST between them counted 23 Nobel Prize winners amongst their former staff and students. Manchester has traditionally been particularly strong in the sciences, with the nuclear nature of the atom being discovered at Manchester by Rutherford, and the world's first stored-program computer coming into being at the university. Famous scientists associated with the university include the physicists Osborne Reynolds, Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Arthur Schuster, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Balfour Stewart. However, the university has also contributed in many other fields, such as by the work of the mathematicians Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing; the author Anthony Burgess; philosophers Samuel Alexander, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre; the Pritzker Prize and RIBA Stirling Prize winning architect Norman Foster and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies all attended, or worked in, Manchester. Well-known figures among the current academic staff include author Martin Amis, computer scientist Steve Furber, literary critic Terry Eagleton, economist Richard Nelson and biochemist Sir John Sulston, Nobel laureate of 2002.
In 2004, the Victoria University of Manchester (established in 1851) and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (established in 1824) were formally merged into a single institution.

The university today

The newly merged University of Manchester was officially launched on 22 October, 2004 when the Queen handed over the Royal Charter. It has the largest number of full time students in the UK, unless the University of London is counted as a single university. It teaches more academic subjects than any other British university. The President and Vice-Chancellor of the new university is Alan Gilbert, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, who has announced that he shall retire at the end of the 2009-2010 academic year. One of his stated ambitions for the newly combined university is to 'establish it by 2015 among the 25 strongest research universities in the world on commonly accepted criteria of research excellence and performance'. Manchester has the largest total income of all UK universities, standing at £637 million as of 2007. Its research income of £216 million is the fifth largest of any university in the country.

Reputation

The university has a very high quality research profile. In the first national assessment of higher education research since the university’s founding, the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, the University of Manchester came 3rd in terms of research power after Cambridge and Oxford and 6th for grade point average quality (8th when including specialist institutions). Accordingly, Manchester enjoys the largest amount of research funding behind Oxbridge, UCL and Imperial (these five universities being informally referred to as the 'golden diamond' of research-intensive UK institutions). Historically, the university has been linked with high scientific achievement: the constituent former institutions combined have 23 Nobel Laureates among their former students and staff, the third largest number of any single university in the United Kingdom behind Oxford and Cambridge; in fact, excluding Oxbridge, Manchester has graduated more Nobel laureates than any other university in the UK.
The Times Higher World University Rankings 2009 ranked Manchester overall 26th in the world and 5th by employer reviews while the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2008 published by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked Manchester 5th in the UK, 6th in Europe and 40th in the world. After several years of steady progress Manchester fell back in 2009 to 41st in the world and 7th in Europe. Excluding US universities, Manchester is ranked 13th and 11th in the world for 2009 by THES and ARWU respectively. According to the ARWU rankings the university is ranked 9th in Europe for natural sciences and 4th in engineering. Similarly the HEEACT 2009 rankings for scientific performance place Manchester 5th in Europe for engineering, 8th for natural sciences and 3rd for social sciences. And finally THES ranks Manchester 6th in Europe for technology, 10th for life sciences and 7th for social sciences.
According to High Fliers Research Limited's survey, 'The Graduate Market in 2007', University of Manchester students are being targeted by more top recruiters for 2007 graduate vacancies than any other UK university students. Furthermore the university has been ranked joint 20th in the world for 2009 according to the Professional Ranking of World Universities. Its main compilation criterion is the number of Chief Executive Officers (or number 1 executive equivalent) which are among the "500 leading worldwide companies" as measured by revenue who studied in each university. The ranking places the University only behind Oxford nationally. Also a further report places Manchester within the top 20 universities outside the US.
While as a rule world rankings (such as the ARWU, THES and HEEACT) typically place the university within the top 10 in Europe, national studies are less complementary; the Times 'Good University Guide' 2009 ranked Manchester 27th of 113 Universities in the UK, as did the Independent's 'Complete University Guide',while the Guardian has ranked it as low as 32nd place in the UK. This apparent paradox is mainly a reflection of the different ranking methodologies employed by each listing: global rankings focus on research and international prestige, whereas national rankings are largely based on teaching and the student experience.

John Rylands University Library

The university's library, the John Rylands University Library, is the largest non-legal deposit library in the UK, as well as being the country's third-largest academic library after those of Oxford and Cambridge. It also has the largest collection of electronic resources of any library in the UK. The oldest part of the library, founded in memory of John Rylands by his wife Enriqueta Augustina Rylands as an independent institution, is situated in a Victorian Gothic building on Deansgate, Manchester city centre. This site houses an important collection of historic books and manuscripts, including the oldest extant New Testament document, Rylands Library Papyrus P52, the so-called St John fragment. The Deansgate site has recently (April 2007) reopened to the public, following major improvements and renovations, including the construction of the pitched roof originally intended and a new wing in Spinningfield.

Jodrell Bank Observatory

The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics is a combination of the astronomical academic staff, situated in Manchester, and the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Goostrey, about ten miles (16 km) west of Macclesfield. The observatory boasts the third largest fully-movable radio telescope in the world, the Lovell Telescope, constructed in the 1950s. It has played an important role in the research of quasars, pulsars and gravitational lenses, and has played a role in confirming Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

Manchester Museum

The Manchester Museum provides access to nearly 4.25 million items sourced from around the world. Collections include butterflies and carvings from India, birds and bark-cloth from the Pacific, live frogs and ancient pottery from America, fossils and native art from Australia, mammals and ancient Egyptian craftsmanship from Africa, plants, coins and minerals from Europe, art from past civilisations of the Mediterranean, and beetles, armour and archery from Asia. In November 2004, the museum acquired a cast of a fossilised Tyrannosaurus rex called "Stan", which was unveiled. Furthermore, a new exhibition was opened at the museum in April 2008, which is set to last for a year, and will display the Lindow Man, which is currently at the British Museum in London.
The history of the museum goes back to 1821, when the first collections were assembled by the Manchester Society of Natural History and later added by the collections of the Manchester Geological Society. Due to financial difficulties and on the advice of the great evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, Owens College accepted responsibility for the collections in 1867. The college commissioned Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of London’s Natural History Museum, to design a museum to house these collections for the benefit of students and the public on a new site in Oxford Road. The Manchester Museum was finally opened to the public in the late 1880s.

Whitworth Art Gallery

The Whitworth Art Gallery is home to collections of internationally famous British watercolours, textiles and wallpapers, as well as modern and historic prints, drawings, paintings and sculpture. It overall contains 31,000 items in its collection. A programme of temporary exhibitions runs throughout the year, with the Mezzanine Court serving as a venue for showing sculpture. It was founded by Robert Darbishire with a donation from Sir Joseph Whitworth in 1889, as The Whitworth Institute and Park. 70 years later the gallery became official part of the University of Manchester. In October 1995 a Mezzanine Court in the centre of the building was opened. This new gallery, designed chiefly for the display of sculptures, won a RIBA regional award.

Manchester University Press

Manchester University Press is an academic publishing house which exists as part of the university. It publishes academic monographs as well as textbooks and journals, the majority of which are works from authors based elsewhere in the international academic community, and is the third largest university press in England after Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Contact Theatre

The Contact Theatre largely stages modern live performance and participatory work for younger audiences. The present fortress-style building on Devas Street was completed in 1999 but incorporates parts of its 1960s predecessor. It features a unique energy-efficient system, using its high towers to naturally ventilate the building without the use of air conditioning. The colourful and curvaceous interior houses three performance spaces, a lounge bar and Hot Air, a reactive public artwork in the foyer.

Old Quadrangle

The buildings around the Old Quadrangle date from the time of Owens College, and were designed in a Gothic style by Alfred Waterhouse (and his son Paul Waterhouse). The first to be built (in 1873) was the John Owens Building (formerly the Main Building: the others were added over the next thirty years. In fact, the Rear Quadrangle is older than the Old Quadrangle. Today, the museum continues to occupy part of one side (including the tower) and the grand setting of the Whitworth Hall is used for the conferment of degrees. Part of the old Christie Library (1898) now houses Christie's Bistro, and the remainder of the buildings house administrative departments.

Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre

Formerly named The Firs, the original house was built in 1850 for Sir Joseph Whitworth by Edward Walters, who was also responsible for Manchester’s Free Trade Hall and Strangeways Prison. Whitworth used The Firs mainly as a social, political and business base, entertaining radicals of the age such as John Bright, Richard Cobden, William Forster and T.H. Huxley at the time of the Reform Bill of 1867. Whitworth, credited with raising the art of machine-tool building to a previously-unknown level, supported the new Mechanics Institute in Manchester – the birthplace of UMIST - and helped to found the Manchester School of Design. Whilst living in the house, Whitworth used land to the rear (now the site of the University's botanical glasshouses) for testing his "Whitworth rifle". In 1882, the Firs was leased to C.P. Scott, Editor of the Manchester Guardian. After Scott's death the house became the property of Owens College, and was the Vice-Chancellor's residence until 1991. The old house now forms the western wing of Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre at the University. The newer eastern wing houses the circular Flowers Theatre, six individual conference rooms and the majority of the 75 hotel bedrooms.
Moreover, the University owns and operate the Manchester Conference Centre on Sackville Street that offers conference facilities in its two theatres (seating up to 300) and 19 seminar rooms.

Residential campuses

Prior to merging, the two former universities had for some time been sharing their residential facilities.
The Sackville Street Campus is the former UMIST Campus, comprising five halls of residence central to the Sackville Street building (Weston, Lambert, Fairfield, Chandos, and Wright Robinson), and several other halls within a 5-15 minute walk away, such as the Grosvenor group of halls. Whitworth park halls of residence are on the southern edge of the Oxford Road Campus which also includes a few smaller blocks of accommodation: the former Moberly Tower is now vacant.
The Fallowfield Campus, situated 2 miles (3.2 km) south of the main university campus (the Oxford Road Campus), is the largest of the university's residential campuses. The Owens Park group of halls with its landmark tower lies at the centre of it, while Oak House is another large hall of residence. Woolton Hall is also on the Fallowfield campus next to Oak House. Allen Hall is a traditional hall situated near Ashburne Hall (Sheavyn House being annexed to Ashburne). Richmond Park is also a relatively recent addition to the campus.
Victoria Park Campus, situated between Fallowfield and the Oxford Road Campus, just off Wilmslow Road in Rusholme, comprises several halls of residence. Among these are St Anselm Hall with Canterbury Court, Dalton-Ellis Hall (with Pankhurst Court), Hulme Hall (including Burkhardt House), St Gabriel's Hall and Opal Gardens Hall.