Birkbeck, University of London
In 1823 George Birkbeck, a physician turned educationalist, began lecturing to London mechanics at the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand; the Mechanics' Institution that followed was among the first in the world. The college that bears his name joined the University of London in 1920 and has kept the founding arrangement ever since: classes begin at six in the evening, when the day's work is done.
The arrangement is not nostalgia but a contract with the city — Birkbeck teaches the nurses, clerks, drivers and carers who cannot buy back their days. Its Malet Street building sits beside the University of London's Senate House; in its laboratories in the 1930s and 40s, J.D. Bernal and his colleagues, Dorothy Hodgkin among them, worked out the X-ray crystallography that would later read the structures of penicillin and protein.
Field notes
- Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, studied here by evening while working as a teacher.
- Bernal's 'Birkbeck rota' of crystallographers helped found molecular biology in Britain.
- Lectures start at 18:00; the café therefore serves a genuinely necessary espresso.
Notable connections
In brief — from the field guide
The evening university. Founded in 1823 to teach working Londoners after their working day, Birkbeck still holds its classes between six and nine — and its students still arrive from the day's work.
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