Building England’s First Technical College: The Laboratories of Finsbury Technical College, 1878–1926

Abstract

Like the 1960s, the 1870s were a golden age for new academic buildings, not merely in Great Britain, but also in Europe generally. Between 1873 and 1874 the Cavendish Physical Laboratory was opened at the University of Cambridge to the designs of W. M. Fawcett, with fittings devised by James Clerk Maxwell based upon the experiences of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford and of William Thomson’s laboratory at Glasgow. In 1874 laboratories were opened at the new Royal Naval College at Greenwich, science colleges were opened at Bristol and Leeds, and George Cary Foster began to teach practical physics at University College London — to be followed three years later by W. G. Adams at rival Kings College. In 1878 Alfred Waterhouse’s Gothic University College opened in Liverpool, with its extraordinary tiered chemical laboratory designed by James Campbell Brown; Sheffield responded with Firth College in 1879; and the decade ended in 1880 with the opening of Mason’s College in Birmingham and the beginning of the new City & Guilds of London Institute’s ambitious building programme for technical education — completed in 1883 as Finsbury Technical College and in 1885, at South Kensington, with Waterhouse’s Queen Anne-style Central Institution.