West London Institute of Higher Education

The West London Institute of Higher Education was located in Isleworth and East Twickenham, West London, UK from 1976 until 1995 when it became Brunel University College. It subsequently was fully integrated in 1997 into Brunel University.

West London Institute was created in 1976 from the merger of Borough Road and Maria Grey teacher training colleges and Chiswick Polytechnic. Borough Road College, on the Osterley campus, dated back to 1889 in that location, and to 1798 in its previous home on Borough Road in Southwark. As a College of Higher Education from 1976, West London received funding from local government, and it had to perform adequately in the higher education sector. It was placed under the direction, as Principal, of a sport psychologist and former physical education lecturer, Dr. John Kane, and a geographer Murie Robertson, who served as Vice-Principal. It awarded undergraduate degrees (CNAA) and HNDs, and continued to train teachers, being, for example, a specialist 'Wing College' for Physical Education. Operating over two campuses, one on St. Margarets Road in East Twickenham, Middlesex alongside the River Thames, and the other one north on the Great West Road in Osterley, Isleworth. The Institute had a strong reputation for sport, and produced many outstanding performers, particularly in track and field athletics and rugby. The Borough Road name persisted on the rugby field and on the institute's sports strip.

By the 1980s the degree and diploma programmes at WLIHE were operating in a variety of disciplines. The Osterley campus was home to English Literature, History, Religious Studies, Geography, Geology, Business Studies, Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Social Work, and Sports Studies, while the arts, music, and education were clustered two miles away at the old Maria Grey College site in East Twickenham. For a number of years, the College was affiliated to The University of London's Institute of Education and therefore offered University of London degree courses. By the 1990s the courses offered were mostly joint honours awards in various combinations including: American Studies, Drama, Art, French, Business Studies, English Literature, Geography, Geology, History, Religious Studies, Music and Sports Studies, plus single honours degrees in Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, and Social Work. By the 1990s a few Masters programmes were also offered, for example in Sport Sciences (the first in Greater London), Social Work, and Environmental Change. A small number of PhDs were also awarded across the disciplines. The British and Foreign School Society [1] kept an archive and ran a National Religious Education Centre on the Osterley site. The Twickenham site also contained a ballet school, the Rambert. For its size and status (Higher Education colleges in the UK were not really expected to be high research performers), the Institute performed relatively well in research, with several departments achieving national recognition in the Research Assessment Exercises of the 1980s and 1990s (1992 result here), and a few staff held national research awards from the ESRC and other bodies.

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