Congress venue

The 2013 Congress will be hosted by The University of Manchester. The symposia and other paper sessions will take place at the University’s main site on Oxford Road, a few minutes’ walk south of the city centre. Guest accommodation will be available at a variety of convenient locations in central Manchester.

About the University

The University of Manchester traces its origins to 1824 and the founding of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute, set up to provide practical education in one of the fastest-growing towns of industrial Europe. Later, from the 1880s, the Institute caught the wave of a growing national movement for technical education, partly inspired by developments in Germany and the United States. As the School of Technology, it gained an impressive new building in the city centre. By the 1960s, this site had extended to become the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.

The University’s second major root appeared in 1851, thanks to a bequest from John Owens, a local textile manufacturer. At this time, formal higher learning in England was dominated by the ancient Universities of Oxford and Cambridge: Owens’ legacy was a college to provide a traditional, wide-ranging pattern of education to the people of Manchester. Though its curriculum remained broad, Owens College grew and prospered through its links with manufacturers and engineers, building a particularly strong international reputation in chemistry.

In 1873, having outgrown its initial site, Owens College moved to Oxford Road. The impressive neo-Gothic Main Building became the focus of an ever-growing campus as the College became a University, underwent postwar expansion, and in 2004 merged with the Institute of Science and Technology to create the largest single-site university in Britain.

Congress location

University Place, the main Congress venue, is a new purpose-built auditorium and classroom complex at the very heart of the old campus, on a site rich in major contributions to world history.

Just across Oxford Road, within a minute’s walk from here, Ernest Rutherford devised the nuclear model of the atom; Hans Geiger built his first radiation counters; Marie Stopes began her academic career; Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn engineered the first stored-program computer; and Alan Turing pondered the prospect of machine intelligence.

The historic campus also includes the Manchester Museum – close enough to visit during session breaks – with its extensive natural history collections, Egyptology displays and vivarium. The Oxford Road area is well served for cafés (and pubs!), with the Whitworth Art Gallery and the restaurants of Rusholme in walking distance.

The staff and students of the University's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine work close by, and will be in attendance throughout the Congress.

 

For more information about the University’s history, please see John Pickstone’s article, “Owens College and the Technical School”, and James Sumner’s contributions to the BSHS Travel Guide.