Birkbeck (sometimes still called Birkbeck College) is a College of the University of London. It aims at working people who want to study for degrees in the evenings (adult education). Its main building is on Malet Street in Bloomsbury.
The College takes its name from George Birkbeck, an early pioneer of adult education who founded the London Mechanics Institute in 1823. The Institute changed its name to the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution in 1866 and became Birkbeck College in 1907. In 1920 it became a school of the University. By 2002, it dropped the word College to become simply Birkbeck, University of London, however the term Birkbeck College is still often colloquially used and survives on the facade of the main building itself.
Birkbeck is also sometimes referred to by the abbreviation BBK.
External link
Birkbeck, University of London, website (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/)
The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities was established in 2004, with the renowned but controversial Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek appointed as International Director.
Birkbeck's School of English and Humanities was rated 5* in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, as were the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, and the section for Spanish and Latin American studies within the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture -- ranking these departments with, and in some cases above, Oxford and Cambridge.
George Birkbeck (1776-1841) was a doctor, academic, philanthropist and early pioneer in adult education.
Born to a Quaker family in Settle, North Yorkshire, Birkbeck went to school in Sedbergh and then completed his training as a doctor in Edinburgh in 1799.
The Mechanics Institute concept was quickly adopted in numerous other cities and towns across the UK and overseas, but his association with the ground-breaking London institution was marked by it being renamed the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution in 1866 (now, as Birkbeck College, part of the University of London).
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