Brunel University London Information

Brunel University London is a public research university located in Uxbridge, western Greater London, United Kingdom. It was founded in 1966 and named after the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

It is organised into three colleges and three major research institutes, a structure adopted in August 2014 which also changed the universitys name to Brunel University London. Brunel has over 12,900 students and 2,500 staff, and had a total income of £200.7 million in 2014/15, of which 25% came from grants and research contracts.

Brunel College of Technology separated from Acton Technical College in 1957, and focused on the education of engineers. Brunel College of Technology was awarded the status of College of Advanced Technology in 1960 and became Brunel College of Advanced Technology in 1962. In June 1966 Brunel College of Advanced Technology was awarded a royal charter and became Brunel University. It is often described as a British plate glass university.

Brunel is a member of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the European University Association, and Universities UK.

Brunel is one of a number of British universities which were established in the 1960s following the Robbins Report on higher education. It is sometimes described as a "plate glass university". The universitys origins lie in Acton Technical College, which was split into two in 1957: Acton Technical College continued to cater for technicians and craftsmen, and the new Brunel College of Technology (named after Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the British engineer) was dedicated to the education of chartered engineers.

The campus buildings were designed in the Brutalist style of architecture by Richard Sheppard, Robson and Partners, Architects.

In 1960 Brunel College of Technology was awarded the status of College of Advanced Technology, and it was decided that it should expand at another site in order to accommodate the extra buildings that would be needed. Uxbridge was chosen to house the new buildings, and construction work hadn’t even begun before the Ministry of Education officially changed the College’s status: it was officially named Brunel College of Advanced Technology in 1962 – the tenth Advanced Technology College in the country, and the last to be awarded this title.

The Uxbridge (Vine Street) railway branch line was closed in 1964, and the college purchased the land adjacent to its site where the railway had run for £65,000 from the local council.

The royal charter granting university status was awarded on 9 June 1966. The university continued to use both campuses until 1971 when it left the Acton site.

In 1980 the university merged with Shoreditch College of Education, located at Coopers Hill, Runnymede. This became Brunels second campus. In 1995 the university expanded again, integrating the West London Institute of Higher Education, and adding campuses in Osterley and Twickenham. This increased the number of courses that Brunel University was able to offer. Traditionally the universitys strengths were in engineering, science, technology and social sciences but with the addition of the West London Institute, new departments such as arts, humanities, geography and earth science, health and sports science were added, and the size of the student body increased to over 12,000.

Brunel has been the subject of controversy as its approach to higher education has been both market-driven and politically conservative. The decision to award an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher in 1996, following the University of Oxfords refusal to do so, provoked an outcry by staff and students, and as a result the ceremony had to be held in the House of Lords instead of on campus. In the late 1990s, the Departments of Physics, Chemistry, and Materials Engineering were all closed, and, in 2004, the then Vice-Chancellor Steven Schwartz, initiated the reorganisation of the universitys faculties and departments into schools, and closed the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences. The succeeding Vice-Chancellor, the sociologist Christopher Jenks, took office in 2006. and he was followed by Julia Buckingham, previously at Imperial College London, who took up the position of Vice Chancellor at Brunel in October 2012.

In June 2011, Brunel University licensed Creative Barcode, an automated idea sharing platform which protects ownership of early stage ideas. The name was changed to Brunel University London by a supplemental charter dated 16 July 2014.

In the late 1990s Brunel devised a 10-year, £250 million masterplan for the campus. This involved selling off campus sites at Runnymede, Osterley and Twickenham and using the revenue from the sales to renovate and update the buildings and facilities on the Uxbridge campus. Works carried out included a library extension, a state-of-the-art sports complex, renovated students union facilities, a new Health Sciences teaching centre, and the construction of more halls of residence.

The Brunel campus (especially those buildings in the 1960s Brutalist architectural style) has appeared in several films, most famously in Stanley Kubricks A Clockwork Orange, large parts of which were filmed on campus. It has also featured in several UK television series including Spooks, Silent Witness,The Sweeney and Inspector Morse.

Brunel has three constituent Academic Colleges:

Research at Brunel has been organised into three institutes:

Brunel exists by virtue of a royal charter first granted in 1966 and it has the status of an exempt charity as defined by the Charities Act 2006.

The governing body of Brunel is the Council, which comprises university staff and students and independent members. The Council appoints the Vice-Chancellor and other senior officers. The Council has a number of Committees which support its work.

The current Chancellor of the university is Sir Richard Sykes, a biochemist and former Rector of Imperial College London. The Vice-Chancellor since 2012 is Julia Buckingham, formerly Professor of Pharmacology at Imperial College.

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