University of Manchester Information

The University of Manchester is a public research university in Manchester, England, formed in 2004 by the merger of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and the Victoria University of Manchester. The University of Manchester is a red brick university, a product of the civic university movement of the late 19th century.

The main campus is south of Manchester city centre on Oxford Road. The university owns and operates major cultural assets such as the Manchester Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery, John Rylands Library and Jodrell Bank Observatory—a UNESCO World Heritage Site.In 2016/17, the university had 40,490 students and 10,400 staff, making it the second largest university in the UK (out of 167 including the Open University), and the largest single-site university. The university had a consolidated income of £1 billion in 2017–18, of which £298.7 million was from research grants and contracts (6th place nationally behind Oxford, UCL, Cambridge, Imperial and Edinburgh). It has the fourth-largest endowment of any university in the UK, after the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. It is a member of the worldwide Universities Research Association, the Russell Group of British research universities and the N8 Group.

In global university league tables, the university was ranked 27th in the QS World University Rankings 2020, 57th in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019, and 33rd in the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2019, while in national tables it was ranked 15th by the Complete University Guide 2020, 34th by the Guardian University Guide 2020 and joint 19th by the Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide 2019. Manchester was ranked 15th in the UK amongst multi-faculty institutions for the quality (GPA) of its research and 5th for its Research Power in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework.

The University of Manchester has 25 Nobel laureates among its past and present students and staff, the fourth-highest number of any single university in the United Kingdom. Four Nobel laureates are currently among its staff – more than any other British university.

The University of Manchester traces its roots to the formation of the Mechanics Institute (later UMIST) in 1824, and its heritage is linked to Manchesters pride in being the worlds first industrial city. The English chemist John Dalton, together with Manchester businessmen and industrialists, established the Mechanics Institute to ensure that workers could learn the basic principles of science.

John Owens, a textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 (around £5.6 million in 2005 prices) to found a college to educate men on non-sectarian lines. His trustees established Owens College in 1851 in a house on the corner of Quay Street and Byrom Street which had been the home of the philanthropist Richard Cobden, and subsequently housed Manchester County Court. The locomotive designer, Charles Beyer became a governor of the college and was the largest single donor to the college extension fund, which raised the money to move to a new site and construct the main building now known as the John Owens building. He also campaigned and helped fund the engineering chair, the first applied science department in the north of England. He left the college the equivalent of £10 million in his will in 1876, at a time when it was in great financial difficulty. Beyer funded the total cost of construction of the Beyer building to house the biology and geology departments. His will also funded Engineering chairs and the Beyer Professor of Applied mathematics.

The university has a rich German heritage. The Owens College Extension Movement based their plans after a tour of mainly German universities and polytechnics. Manchester mill owner, Thomas Ashton, chairman of the extension movement had studied at Heidelberg University. Sir Henry Roscoe also studied at Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen and they collaborated for many years on research projects. Roscoe promoted the German style of research led teaching that became the role model for the redbrick universities. Charles Beyer studied at Dresden Academy Polytechnic. There were many Germans on the staff, including Carl Schorlemmer, Britains first chair in organic chemistry, and Arthur Schuster, professor of Physics. There was even a German chapel on the campus.

In 1873 the college moved to new premises on 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 becoming Englands first civic university; it was renamed the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903 and absorbed Owens College the following year. By 1905, the institutions were large and active forces. The Municipal College of Technology, forerunner of UMIST, was the Victoria University of Manchesters Faculty of Technology while continuing in parallel as a technical college offering advanced courses of study. Although UMIST achieved independent university status in 1955, the universities continued to work together. However, in the late-20th century, formal connections between the university and UMIST diminished and in 1994 most of the remaining institutional ties were severed as new legislation allowed UMIST to become an autonomous university with powers to award its own degrees. A decade later the development was reversed. The Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology agreed to merge into a single institution in March 2003.

Before the merger, Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST counted 23 Nobel Prize winners amongst their former staff and students, with two further Nobel laureates being subsequently added. Manchester has traditionally been strong in the sciences; it is where the nuclear nature of the atom was discovered by Ernest Rutherford, and the worlds first electronic stored-program computer was built at the university. Notable scientists associated with the university include physicists Ernest Rutherford, Osborne Reynolds, Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, Arthur Schuster, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Balfour Stewart. Contributions in other fields such as mathematics were made by Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing and in philosophy by Samuel Alexander, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre. The author Anthony Burgess, Pritzker Prize and RIBA Stirling Prize-winning architect Norman Foster and composer Peter Maxwell Davies all attended, or worked at, Manchester.

The current University of Manchester was officially launched on 1 October 2004 when Queen Elizabeth bestowed its Royal Charter. The university was named the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2006 after winning the inaugural Times Higher Education Supplement University of the Year prize in 2005.

The founding president and vice-chancellor of the new university was Alan Gilbert, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, who retired at the end of the 2009–2010 academic year. His successor was Dame Nancy Rothwell, who had held a chair in physiology at the university since 1994. One of the universitys aims stated in the Manchester 2015 Agenda is to be one of the top 25 universities in the world, following on from Alan Gilberts aim to "establish it by 2015 among the 25 strongest research universities in the world on commonly accepted criteria of research excellence and performance". In 2011, four Nobel laureates were on its staff: Andre Geim,Konstantin Novoselov,Sir John Sulston and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

The EPSRC announced in February 2012 the formation of the National Graphene Institute. The University of Manchester is the "single supplier invited to submit a proposal for funding the new £45m institute, £38m of which will be provided by the government" – (EPSRC and Technology Strategy Board). In 2013, an additional £23 million of funding from European Regional Development Fund was awarded to the institute taking investment to £61 million.

In August 2012, it was announced that the universitys Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences had been chosen to be the "hub" location for a new BP International Centre for Advanced Materials, as part of a $100 million initiative to create industry-changing materials. The centre will be aimed at advancing fundamental understanding and use of materials across a variety of oil and gas industrial applications and will be modelled on a hub and spoke structure, with the hub located at Manchester, and the spokes based at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

The universitys main site contains most of its facilities and is often referred to as the campus, however Manchester is not a campus university as the concept is commonly understood. It is centrally located in the city and its buildings are integrated into the fabric of Manchester, with non-university buildings and major roads between.

The campus occupies an area shaped roughly like a boot: the foot of which is aligned roughly south-west to north-east and is joined to the broader southern part of the boot by an area of overlap between former UMIST and former VUM buildings; it comprises two parts:

The names are not officially recognised by the university, but are commonly used, including in parts of its website and roughly correspond to the campuses of the old UMIST and Victoria University respectively.

Fallowfield Campus is the main residential campus in Fallowfield, approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) south of the main site.

There are other university buildings across the city and the wider region, such as Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire and One Central Park in Moston, a collaboration between the university and other partners which offers office space for start-up firms and venues for conferences and workshops,

Following the merger, the university embarked on a £600 million programme of capital investment, to deliver eight new buildings and 15 major refurbishment projects by 2010, partly financed by a sale of unused assets. These include:

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