Nottingham still displays the blackboard Einstein chalked on during his visit
When University College Nottingham moved to its new parkland campus in the late 1920s, Albert Einstein came to speak, as did Mahatma Gandhi and H. G. Wells. The blackboard Einstein wrote on during his lecture is still on show in the university's Physics department.
The university's roots go back to an adult education school founded in 1798 and to Cambridge's extension lectures, which began in Nottingham in 1873 before spreading elsewhere. An anonymous £10,000 gift in 1875 put that teaching on a permanent footing, and former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone laid the foundation stone of a neo-gothic college on Shakespeare Street in 1877. Prince Leopold opened it on 30 July 1881, with four professors covering literature, physics, chemistry and natural science.
After the First World War, Nottingham proposed a federal East Midlands University joining it with Leicester, Loughborough and colleges in other towns. Leicester objected to Nottingham's dominance, and by 1927 the scheme had been abandoned in favour of going it alone.
The move out of the cramped city-centre building owed much to Sir Jesse Boot, who gave 35 acres to the city in 1921. He insisted that part of the Highfields site serve the college while the rest become a public park, complete with a lake. King George V opened the white limestone Trent Building, with its clock tower, on 10 July 1928. The old Shakespeare Street building now belongs to Nottingham Trent University.
During the Second World War the college hosted evacuees from London, including hundreds of students from Goldsmiths' College, then the country's largest teacher training college, which arrived on 18 September 1939 and stayed an extra year because its London buildings were badly damaged. Full university status came with a royal charter in 1948. Today Nottingham also runs campuses in Malaysia and China and has more than 46,000 students.
Source: University of Nottingham
