Morley College
 |
|
| Type | Further Education |
|---|---|
| Principal | Dr Andrew Gower |
| Location |
61 Westminster Bridge Road London SE1 7HT England, United Kingdom |
| Gender | Mixed |
| Ages | –no upper age limit |
| Website | www |
Morley College is an adult education college in London. It was founded in the 1880s and has a student population of 11,000 adult students. It offers courses in a wide variety of fields including art and design, fashion, languages, drama, dance, music, health and humanities.
Morley College is located in the Waterloo District of London, on the South Bank, close to the city's arts centre. Its buildings occupy sites on either side of the boundary between the London boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth.
Morley College is a registered charity under English law.
In the early 1880s, philanthropist Emma Cons and her supporters took over the Royal Victoria Hall, (the "Old Vic") a boozy, rowdy home of melodrama, and turned it into the Royal Victoria Coffee and Music Hall to provide inexpensive entertainment "purged of innuendo in word and action". The programme included music-hall turns with opera recitals, temperance meetings, and, from 1882, lectures every Tuesday by eminent scientists.
Local enthusiasm for these "penny lectures" and success in attracting substantial philanthropic funding, led in 1889 to the opening of Morley Memorial College for Working Men and Women. The College was founded by an endowment from Samuel Morley, MP for Nottingham and later Bristol. Samuel Morley is buried at Dr Watts' Walk, Abney Park Cemetery, in Stoke Newington, London.
The College was run separately from the Theatre, but held its classes and student meetings back-stage and in the theatre dressing rooms. The two split in the 1920s, when Emma's niece and successor Lilian Baylis raised funds to acquire a separate site nearby. It attracted some intellectual celebrities such as Virginia Woolf.
Around the same time as the founding of Morley College (c.1880s), concern for the education of working people led to the establishment of other institutions in south London such as the forerunner of the South London Gallery.
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