London South Bank University
The Borough Road site has been educating London since the early nineteenth century — teacher training began there before Waterloo had faded from memory — and the polytechnic founded on it in 1892 served the workshops and railways of south London. Engineering, baking and pharmacy were the first trades; the National Bakery School followed within two years and still teaches the city its bread.
The university now sits at the Elephant and Castle's rebuilt crossroads, teaching engineering, health, business and law to a student body drawn overwhelmingly from the city around it. Its Keyworth Street buildings hold the bakery and the engineering halls side by side — a nineteenth-century arrangement wearing twenty-first-century cladding.
Field notes
- The National Bakery School (1894) was Britain's first — student bread has been sold at the Elephant ever since.
- Borough Road trained teachers for two hundred years; the road name is older than the polytechnic by a century.
- Its wedding-cake research — a real speciality — has informed British baking standards.
Notable connections
In brief — from the field guide
The Borough Polytechnic opened at the Elephant & Castle in 1892 on a site that had trained teachers since the 1810s. Its National Bakery School, founded 1894, was the first in Britain — and is still running.
The live encyclopaedia brief loads when available · read the full article · reused under CC BY-SA