The story
Founding
The University of Nottingham traces its origins to both the founding of an adult education school in 1798, and the University Extension Lectures inaugurated by the University of Cambridge in 1873, which were launched at Nottingham before expanding to other posts of the country. However, the foundation of the university is generally regarded as being the establishment of University College Nottingham, in 1881 as a college preparing students for examinations of the University of London.
In 1875, an anonymous donor provided £10,000 to establish the work of the Adult Education School and Cambridge Extension Lectures on a permanent basis, and the Corporation of Nottingham agreed to erect and maintain a building for this purpose and to provide funds to supply the instruction.
The foundation stone of the college was duly laid in 1877 by the former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and the college's neo-gothic building on Shakespeare Street was formally opened on 30 July 1881 by Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, with the college admitting its first students that autumn In 1881, there were four professors – of Literature, Physics, Chemistry and Natural Science. New departments and chairs quickly followed: Engineering in 1884, Classics combined with Philosophy in 1893, French in 1897 and Education in 1905; in 1905 the combined Department of Physics and Mathematics became two separate entities; in 1911 Departments of English and Mining were created, in 1912, Economics, and Geology combined with Geography; History in 1914, Adult Education in 1923 and Pharmacy in 1925. The university college was part of the Borough of Nottingham, under the town clerk's department, until it was incorporated by royal charter in 1903. While this made it formally independent, there was almost complete overlap between the city council and the court of governors.
Development
Following the first world war, the university college's leadership proposed the creation of a federal East Midlands University, taking in University College Nottingham, University College Leicester, Loughborough College, and other colleges in Lincoln, Derby and Northampton. A charter was drawn up for the federal university but the proposed dominance of Nottingham led to opposition from Leicester in 1923, and in 1927 the proposal was dropped in favour of Nottingham pursuing university status on its own.
The university college underwent significant expansion in the 1920s, when it moved from the centre of Nottingham to a large campus on the city's outskirts. The new campus, called University Park, was completed in 1928, and financed by an endowment fund, public contributions, and the generosity of Sir Jesse Boot (later Lord Trent) who presented 35 acres (14 ha) to the City of Nottingham in 1921. Boot and his fellow benefactors sought to establish an "elite seat of learning" committed to widening participation, and hoped that the move would solve the problems facing University College Nottingham, in its restricted building on Shakespeare Street. Boot stipulated that, whilst part of the Highfields site, lying south-west of the city, should be devoted to the university college, the rest should provide a place of recreation for the residents of the city, and, by the end of the decade, the landscaping of the lake and public park adjoining University Boulevard was completed. The original university college building on Shakespeare Street in central Nottingham, known as the Arkwright Building, now forms part of Nottingham Trent University's City Campus.
University College Nottingham was initially accommodated within the Trent Building, an imposing white limestone structure with a distinctive clock tower, designed by Morley Horder, and formally opened by King George V on 10 July 1928. During this period of development, Nottingham attracted high-profile visiting speakers, including Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells, and Mahatma Gandhi. The blackboard used by Einstein for his lecture at Nottingham is still on display in the Physics department.
Apart from its physical transfer to surroundings that could not be more different from its original home, the college made few developments between the wars. The Department of Slavonic Languages (later Slavonic Studies) was established in 1933, the teaching of Russian having been introduced in 1916. In 1933–34, the departments of Electrical Engineering, Zoology and Geography, which had been combined with other subjects, were made independent; and in 1938 a supplemental charter provided for a much wider representation on the governing body. However, further advances were delayed by the outbreak of war in 1939.
Second World War
350-400 students from Goldsmiths' College and 120 students from the Institute of Education were evacuated from London to Nottingham during the war. Goldsmiths' arrived on Monday 18 September 1939. At the time it was the largest teacher training college in the country and included the artist Evelyn Gibbs on its staff. The Institute of Education returned to London in July 1943. However, the Goldsmiths' buildings in London had been badly damaged so the college remained in Nottingham for another year.
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University status
Until 1948, students of University College Nottingham students sat exams from and were awarded degrees by the University of London. In 1948, the institution was granted a royal charter as the University of Nottingham, giving it university status and the power to confer its own degrees.
In the 1940s, the Midlands Agricultural and Dairy College at Sutton Bonington merged with the university as the School of Agriculture, and in 1956 the Portland Building was completed to complement the Trent Building. In 1970, the university established the UK's first new medical school of the 20th century.
Late 20th century and early 21st century
In 1999, Jubilee Campus was opened on the former site of the Raleigh Bicycle Company, one mile (1.6 km) away from the University Park Campus. Nottingham then began to expand overseas, opening campuses in Malaysia and in China in 1999 and 2004 respectively. In 2005, the King's Meadow Campus opened near University Park.
In 2008, the "Nottingham Two", a member of staff and a postgraduate student at the university, were detained under the Terrorism Act 2000 after the university reported finding an edited version of the al-Qaeda training manual the student was using for his research. Subsequently, the teaching of terrorism studies was dropped at the university.
The university's student rag, Karnival, was suspended in 2016 to ensure compliance with the Charities Act 2016, particularly in the safeguarding of participants in fundraising activities and the people they interacted with. It was reinstated later that year, but an investigation the following year, 2017, determined that "RAG raids" had breached the safeguarding requirements and health and safety policies on multiple occasions, leading the students' union executive to ban these activities.
In the 2020–21 academic year, students of the University of Nottingham organised large-scale campaigns for wider academic, welfare, and financial support for students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2021, the university briefly blocked the appointment of a Catholic chaplain due to his social media posts on abortion and euthanasia. The university maintained that their concern was not about the priest's views but the way they had been expressed. Following discussions, the priest was able to take up the post the following month.
In November 2023, the University of Nottingham became the first university in the UK to be awarded an institutional Athena SWAN Gold Award for its commitment to advancing gender equality.
Financial crisis
In January 2025, the university announced plans to sell its King's Meadow Campus. In November 2025, the university announced that it would permanently suspend 16 courses, including all modern language and music courses, for new students, and that it intended to sell its Castle Meadow Campus. It cited "significant financial challenges" due to decreasing numbers of students, especially international students, as the reason. The accounts for 2024/25 revealed that the Castle Meadow Campus, which the university bought for £37.5 million in 2021 and spent over £40 million refurbishing, was now valued at between £14.8 and £18 million.
In May 2026, the university announced that it could run out of money within five years if further cuts were not made, and warned 2,700 staff that they were at risk of redundancy. The university said it plans to cut over 600 academic and support posts through voluntary redundancies: over 150 in medicine and health science, 134 in the arts faculty, 108 in social sciences, 97 in sciences, and 38 in engineering.
These cuts amount to over 30% of staff in some departments.
Petitions against the cuts at the chemistry and physics departments hgained signatures from thousands of academics, including several Nobel laureates and BBC science presenters.
Presenter and emeritus professor Jim Al-Khalili stated that "Nottingham Physics is one of the most respected and prestigious departments in the country, and this proposed ‘cull’ would be both devastating and foolish", while Nobel prize-winner Roger Penrose added that "the decision to dismiss this large group of physics and astronomy faculty members at the University of Nottingham, through no fault of their own, is appalling and should be reversed immediately".
In June 2026, the university informed students and alumni that it had suffered a data breach in its Campus Solutions system, provided by Oracle. Students' personal and financial data was exposed. University management had spent £16.4 million introducing the system.
In September 2026, the Universities and Colleges Union announced a ten-week strike from October through to December, in protest against the planned cuts. The Guardian reported that this left students "fac[ing] a term without any teaching", while the university said they expected that "many students will experience little or no disruption".
In October 2026, the university confirmed 560 job cuts (reduced from the over 600 previously planned), the closing of courses once current students had graduated, including the complete closure of the music and modern languages departments, and the reorganisation of the university into three "colleges" – health, humanities and social sciences, and science and engineering – by August 2027, replacing the faculties. The university also announced that a new language centre would enable students on most degree courses to take a foreign language module and that extra-curricular music activities would continue to be supported.
From Wikipedia’s article on University of Nottingham, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5