Royal Holloway, University of London

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Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) is one of the larger colleges of the University of London. As of 2005, the college had 6,600 enrolled students from 120 countries.


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General Information

The college's campus is located at Egham, Surrey, just outside the boundary of Greater London. This was originally the campus of Royal Holloway College, an establishment founded by Victorian entrepreneur Thomas Holloway as a women-only college in 1879. Royal Holloway College became part of the University of London in 1900, and men were first admitted in 1965. In 1985, Royal Holloway College merged with Bedford College (another formerly all-women's college in London which was founded in 1849 and, just like Royal Holloway College, joined the University of London in 1900 and became fully co-educational in 1965). The merged college was named Royal Holloway and Bedford New College (RHBNC). This name was changed for day-to-day use to "Royal Holloway, University of London" by the College Council in 1992, although the registered title remains the same.

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Campus

The campus at Egham is dominated by its original building, known as the "Founder's Building", designed by William Henry Crossland and inspired by the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, France. The building was officially opened in 1886 by Queen Victoria, who allowed the use of "Royal" in the college's name. The Founder's Building is part of a campus which is set in 49 hectares (120 acres) of parkland and is within walking distance of Windsor Great Park. On-campus student accommodation is some of the most extensive available in the London area. The size of the campus has also allowed the college to develop some of the best sports facilities of any university institution in the London area, and helped build the college's reputation as one of the leading sporting institutions in the South-East of England. The campus is also well-known for its Picture Gallery, located within the Founder's Building, housing a collection of over seventy pieces of Victorian era art given to the college at the time of its founding by Thomas Holloway.

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Current Position

Royal Holloway is globally recognised as one of the UK’s leading teaching and research institutions, ranking among the top 10 elite research-led UK universities (in the most recent Research Assessment Exercise) and 5th in a league table of UK universities in the 2005 ‘National Survey of Student Satisfaction’ (BBC survey).

All the Royal Holloway academic departments earned the top three ratings for research, with scores of 4, 5 and 5* in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. The University League Table published by The Times newspaper (17 May 2004) ranked Royal Holloway fifteenth among the universities and colleges in the United Kingdom. In the South-East region, Holloway was ranked second, after Oxford University. The table places Royal Holloway 4th in the University of London, after Imperial College, LSE and University College London. The Physics Department of Royal Holloway was ranked first in the United Kingdom by The Guardian newspaper. The School of Management has all three of its MBA programmes accredited by the prestigious AMBA. The departments of History, Geography, Music, Drama, Psychology and Media Arts also have strong reputations, as do several of the European Language departments. In 1998 the college was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize in recognition of the work of the Information Security Group. (This group was mentioned in the recent novel The Da Vinci Code.)

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International Reputation

RHUL has developed one of the UK's best study abroad programmes [1], allowing its students to spend a year in elite institutions including Boston College, the University of California (UC Berkeley, UCLA and the other campuses), and New York University in the United States; the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto in Canada; the University of Sydney in Australia; and the National University of Singapore. Postgraduate students also have the opportunity to study at Yale University, making RHUL one of the few university institutions in the UK to be linked with an outstanding Ivy League university, (alongside the likes of Oxford University, Cambridge University and Durham University).

See also: Elizabeth Jesser Reid, founder of Bedford College

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Royal Holloway Students' Union

The Royal Holloway Students' Union (SURHUL) provides entertainment and pastoral services for the student body, including entertainment (bars and club nights), sporting and special-interest societies, and advice and counselling.

Like most students' unions in Britain, SURHUL is run entirely by the student body itself, headed by a team of elected student officers, including four paid sabbaticals. The current SURHUL president is Greg Harris. In keeping with democratic practice, the elected officers' executive power is held in check by the legislative power of General Meetings. General Meetings take place every month of each semester at RHUL, in contrast to some other institutions where they are less frequent, often being held annually.

Within the local area around Egham, SURHUL is best known for its award-winning student radio station, Insanity. Established in 1997, Insanity broadcasts all-year round, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and is available locally over 1287 AM and worldwide over the internet. Insanity has won the title of the UK's second best student radio station in the SRA Student Radio Awards for the past two years running.

SURHUL also publishes a student magazine called The Orbital, which is published eight times a year. Each issue is loosely based around a theme, such as drugs, 'coolness' or love (for the Valentine's Day edition).

On-campus entertainment and social life includes three student-run campus bars, and a large function hall within the students' union building which hosts a wide variety of entertainment events most nights of the week during term time. (However the fact that the Union building has only one function hall with no alternative venues means the variety is not as great as in some other larger universities.)

Through the Royal Holloway World Cinema Society, free screenings of movies from around the world in many different languages are available on campus during term time. SURHUL also maintains numerous other societies, catering to a range of cultural, academic and artistic pursuits, as well as a large number of highly successful sports clubs. One of the societies, JBAS (the James Bond Appreciation Society), runs a high-profile boat party on the River Thames every Spring plus numerous 007-esque activities during the academic year including paintballing and go-karting on ice. The current Society of the Year is the Islamic Society, partly for their fundraising for the 2005 Kashmir Earthquake. The People & Planet society received the VP Cup for their efforts in making Royal Holloway a fair trade university. The Sports Club of the Year went to the Lacrosse team, although many of the sports teams enjoyed a high level of success in the 2005/06 season.

The highlight of the social calendar at the college is the annual RHUL Summer Ball, which is run by the students' union. In recent years the RHUL Summer Ball has booked many high-profile talents, including well-known rock and pop acts such as Wheatus and Atomic Kitten, and comedians such as Ali G. It takes place at the end of the examination period, and is held in the quads of the Founder's Building.

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Notes

The Founder's Building has been the centre of some media attention. The movie Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction was partly filmed in the Founder's Building during the summer of 2005. The film was released in April 2006. The character Sophie Neveu in the best-selling book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown studied cryptography in the (real) Information Security Group at Royal Holloway. This book has now been made into a film starring Tom Hanks. The movie Howards End had some scenes shot inside one of the courtyards with the statue of Queen Victoria visible. [2] Founder's was also used as a university during the filming of "MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis" starring Richard Dean Anderson and Brian Blessed back in the summer of 1993.

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Famous alumni

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Notable members of staff

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External links

Recognised bodies of the University of London

Birkbeck | Goldsmiths | Heythrop | Imperial | Institute of Cancer Research | Institute of Education | King's | London Business School | LSE | London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine | Queen Mary | Royal Academy of Music | Royal Holloway | Royal Veterinary College | St George's | SOAS | School of Pharmacy | UCL

Listed bodies

University of London Institute in Paris | Courtauld Institute of Art | School of Advanced Study | University Marine Biological Station, Millport

fr:Royal Holloway (Université de Londres)
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