19 Facts About Birkbeck College

Birkbeck College's main building is based in the area of Bloomsbury in London Borough of Camden in Central London.

Birkbeck College offers over 200 undergraduate and postgraduate programmes that can be studied either part-time or full-time, though nearly all lectures are given in the evening.

Birkbeck College, being part of the University of London, shares the university's academic standards and awards University of London degrees.

In common with the other University of London colleges, Birkbeck has secured its own independent degree awarding powers, which were confirmed by the Privy Council in July 2012.

The quality of degrees awarded by Birkbeck College was confirmed by the UK Quality Assurance Agency following institutional audits in 2005 and 2010.

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Birkbeck College is a member of academic organisations such as the Association of Commonwealth Universities and the European University Association.

Birkbeck College's alumni include five Nobel laureates, numerous political leaders, members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and a British prime minister.

In 1885, Birkbeck College moved to the Breams Building, on Fetter Lane, where it would remain for the next sixty-seven years.

In 1913, a review of the University of London successfully recommended that Birkbeck become a constituent college, although the outbreak of the First World War delayed this until 1920.

In 2006, Birkbeck College announced that it had been granted £5 million by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to expand its provision into east London, working with the University of East London.

In 1988, the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of the University of London was incorporated into Birkbeck College, becoming at first the Centre for Extramural Studies.

Birkbeck College is principally located between Malet Street and Woburn Square in Bloomsbury, with a number of institutes, teaching hospitals, and scientific laboratories on nearby streets.

Many Birkbeck College classes are taught at other locations around the Bloomsbury area, due to a combination of Birkbeck College's widening participation strategy to make higher education accessible and because nearly all classes on one day are taught at the same time, resulting in heavy competition for limited space.

Birkbeck College expanded into east London, in conjunction with the University of East London.

Birkbeck College is part of the Institute of Structural Molecular Biology, which includes the Bloomsbury Centre for Structural biology, established in 1998.

Birkbeck College was ranked 13th in The Guardian's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and 26th in the Times Higher Education's equivalent table.

In 2010, Birkbeck College was shortlisted for the Times Higher Education University of the Year Award.

Internationally, Birkbeck College is ranked within the top 350 universities in the world by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020 and QS World University Rankings 2020.

In 2018, Birkbeck College announced that it will withdraw from UK university rankings because their methodologies unfairly penalise it, since "despite having highly-rated teaching and research, other factors caused by its unique teaching model and unrelated to its performance push it significantly down the ratings".