University of Reading

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

The University of Reading is a public research university in Reading, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1892 as the University Extension College, Reading, an extension college of Christ Church, Oxford, and became University College, Reading in 1902. The institution became a university with the power to grant its own degrees in 1926 by royal charter from King George V, and was the only university to receive such a charter between the two world wars. The university is usually categorised as a red brick university, reflecting its original foundation in the 19th century.

Reading has four major campuses. In the United Kingdom, the campuses on London Road and Whiteknights are based in the town of Reading itself, and Greenlands is based on the banks of the River Thames in Buckinghamshire. It also has a campus in Iskandar Puteri, Malaysia. The university has been arranged into 16 academic schools since 2016. The annual income of the institution for 2024–25 was £347.8 million of which £33.9 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £366.1 million.

History

University College, Reading

The university owes its first origins to the Schools of Art and Science established in Reading in 1860 and 1870. In 1892, the College at Reading was founded as an extension college by Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford. It opened in September of that year under the name of The University Extension College in Conjunction with the Schools of Science and Art, Reading, which was soon shortened the following spring to The University Extension College, Reading. The first president was the geographer Sir Halford John Mackinder, and the college's first home was the old hospitium building behind Reading Town Hall. The Schools of Art and Science were transferred to the new college by Reading Town Council in 1892.

The new college was incorporated in 1896 and was approved to participate in the Parliamentary grant to university colleges by the Commissioners of the Treasury in 1901, resulting in it changing its name to University College, Reading in 1902. Three years later it was given a site, now the university's London Road Campus, by the Palmer family (connected with the firm of Huntley & Palmers). The same family supported the opening of Wantage Hall in 1908 and of the Research Institute in Dairying in 1912.

University status

The college first applied for a royal charter in 1920 but was unsuccessful at that time. However a second petition, in 1925, was successful, and the charter was officially granted on 17 March 1926. With the charter, the college became the University of Reading, the only new university to be created in the United Kingdom between the two world wars. It was added to the Combined English Universities constituency in 1928 in time for the 1929 general election.

In 1947, the university purchased Whiteknights Park, which was to become its principal campus. In 1984, the university started a merger with Bulmershe College of Higher Education, which was completed in 1989.

2006–present

In October 2006, the Senior Management Board proposed the closure of its Physics Department to future undergraduate application. This was ascribed to financial reasons and lack of alternative ideas and caused considerable controversy, not least a debate in Parliament over the closure which prompted heated discussion of higher education issues in general. On 10 October, the Senate voted to close the Department of Physics, a move confirmed by the council on 20 November. Other departments closed in recent years include Music, Sociology, Geology, and Mechanical Engineering. The university council decided in March 2009 to close the School of Health and Social Care, a school whose courses have consistently been oversubscribed.

In January 2008, the university announced its merger with the Henley Management College to create the university's new Henley Business School, bringing together Henley College's expertise in MBAs with the university's existing Business School and ICMA Centre. The merger took formal effect on 1 August 2008, with the new business school split across the university's existing Whiteknights Campus and its new Greenlands Campus that formerly housed Henley Management College.

A restructuring of the university was announced in September 2009, which would bring together all the academic schools into three faculties, these being the Faculty of Science, the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social sciences, and Henley Business School. The move was predicted to result in the loss of some jobs, especially in the film, theatre and television department, which has since moved into a brand new £11.5 million building on Whiteknights Campus.

In late 2009 it was announced that the London Road Campus was to undergo a £30 million renovation, preparatory to becoming the new home of the university's Institute of Education. The Institute moved to its new home in January 2012. The refurbishment was partially funded by the sale of the adjoining site of Mansfield Hall, a former hall of residence, for demolition and replacement by private sector student accommodation.

The university is a lead sponsor of UTC Reading, a new university technical college which opened in September 2013.

In 2016, a move to reorganise the structure of Reading University provoked student protests. On 21 March 2016, staff announced a vote of no confidence in the vice chancellor Sir David Bell. Eighty-eight per cent of those who voted backed the no confidence motion.

In 2019, The Guardian reported the university was in "a financial and governance crisis" after recently reporting itself to regulators over a £121 million loan. The university is sole trustee of the charitable National Institute for Research in Dairying trust, and after selling trust land had then borrowed the £121 million proceeds from the trust, despite the potential conflict of interest in the decision making. Including this loan, the university has debts of £300 million, as well as having an operating deficit of over £40 million for the past two years.

In 2021, the university declared, in a statement reply to the student's union, that it would not refund tuition fees for its students.

On 11 June 2025, following the For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers Supreme Court ruling, the university announced a change in policy that bans transgender people from using toilets, and other gendered facilities, that match their gender identity. Most universities in the UK, on the other hand, had been waiting for further guidance on the implications of the Supreme Court ruling before making policy changes, with the University and College Union recommending against "hasty or permanent policy changes". The University of Reading's policy change was widely criticised as transphobic, and transgender and gender non-conforming students and staff reported feeling unsafe and unwelcome on campus due to the policy. The university was subsequently banned from the 2025 Reading Pride festival due to its "transphobic toilet policies".

Campuses

The university maintains over 1.6 km2 of grounds, in four distinct campuses:

Whiteknights

Whiteknights Campus, at 1.3 km2, is the largest and includes Whiteknights Lake, conservation meadows and woodlands as well as most of the university's departments. Though within the Reading urban area, most of the campus actually falls within Wokingham District (parish of Earley). The campus takes its name from the nickname of the 13th century knight John De Erleigh IV or the 'White Knight', and was landscaped in the 18th century by the Marquis of Blandford. The main university library, in the middle of the campus, holds nearly a million books and subscribes to around 4,000 periodicals. The URS building, designed by Howell, Killick, Partridge & Amis in concrete brutalist style in the 1970s is Grade II listed. The Whiteknights campus was voted one of the best green spaces in the United Kingdom for the seventh year running in the 2017 Green Flag People's Choice awards.

London Road

The smaller London Road Campus is the original university site and is closer to the town centre of Reading, sited across from the Royal Berkshire Hospital. The London Road site is home to The Institute of Education – a major provider of teacher training in the UK. The Institute moved to its new home in January 2012 after the campus was refurbished at a cost of £30 million. The London Road site also plays host to the university graduation ceremonies twice a year, in the Great Hall.

Greenlands

The Greenlands Campus, on the banks of the River Thames in Buckinghamshire. Once the home of William Henry Smith, son of the founder of WH Smith, and latterly the site of the Henley Management College, this campus became part of the university on 1 August 2008, with the merger of that college with the university's Business School to form the Henley Business School. The school's MBA and corporate learning offerings will be based at Greenlands, with undergraduate and other postgraduate courses being based at Whiteknights.

Malaysia

An Asian campus at Iskandar, Malaysia was formally opened in February 2016. It offers a range of professional programmes at foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate levels including the Henley Business School MBA. First announced in October 2012, it is the university's first overseas campus. The project was overseen by Tony Downes. Professor Wing Lam took over as Provost in May 2018 after the retirement of Tony Downes and restructured the campus to enable it to focus on core professional disciplines that were aligned with the region's need for talent.

Other sites

The former Bulmershe Court Campus in Woodley was the site of the former Bulmershe Teaching College, which merged with The University of Reading in 1989. The campus was sold in January 2014 as the university decided to concentrate its activity on its three other campuses. It had previously moved all teaching and research at Bulmershe either to Whiteknights or to London Road, and closed the student accommodation.

The university also owns 8.5 km2 of farmland in the nearby villages of Arborfield, Sonning and Shinfield. These support a mixed farming system including dairy cows, ewes and beef animals, and host research centres of which the flagship is the Centre for Dairy Research.

As part of the proposed Whiteknights Development Plan in Autumn 2007, the university proposed spending up to £250 million on its estates over 30 years, principally to focus academic activities onto the Whiteknights site. The university also announced its intention to site some functions on the London Road site, and proposed a complete withdrawal from Bulmershe Court by 2012, which was accomplished.

Museums, libraries and botanical gardens

Reading University maintains four museums, the main campus library, a range of inter-departmental libraries, and a botanical garden. The largest and best known of these museums is the Museum of English Rural Life, which has recently relocated from a location on Whiteknights Campus to a site nearer the town centre next to the London Road Campus. The Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, the Cole Museum of Zoology, the University of Reading Herbarium and the Harris Garden are all on the Whiteknights Campus. The Department of Typography and Graphic Communication holds a number of lettering, printing and graphic design collections including those of Isotype, Ephemera, printing presses, Twentieth-century posters, non-Latin typefaces and the archive of partners Banks and Miles.

The University Library at Whiteknights makes available over 1 million physical resources, as well as a range of electronic online resources, from 14,000 square metres of space across seven floors. The secondary site library at the university's Bulmershe campus closed in 2011 and its operative collections were transferred. There is also a library in the university's Meteorology department.

The library underwent refurbishment costing £40 million starting in 2016 and was re-opened in autumn 2019. The redevelopment aimed to improve the energy efficiency of the building with the installation of new windows, cladding and roofing. New lifts, additional study seating capacity, a larger Library cafe with an outside seating area, more toilets (including disabled and gender-neutral provision) and card-access security barriers were also part of the refurbishment programme.

Organisation and governance

Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Science

School of Arts and Communication Design

Department of Art

Department of Film, Theatre and Television

Department of Typography and Graphic Communication

Institute of Education

School of Humanities

Department of Classics

Department of History

School of Law

School of Literature and Languages

Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics

Department of English Literature

Department of Languages and Cultures

School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

Department of Economics

Department of Philosophy

Department of Politics and International Relations

International Study and Language Institute

Faculty of Life Sciences

School of Agriculture, Policy and Development

School of Biological Sciences

School of Chemistry, Food and Pharmacy

Department of Chemistry

Food and Nutritional Sciences

The Reading School of Pharmacy

School of Psychology and Clinical Language Science

Department of Clinical Language Sciences

Department of Psychology

Faculty of Science

School of Construction Management and Engineering

School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science

Department of Archaeology

Department of Geography and Environmental Science

School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Department of Meteorology

Department of Computer Science

Source and attribution

Adapted from “University of Reading” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.