About Us

Keele University is a public research university in Keele, approximately three miles (five kilometres) from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England. Founded in 1949 as the University College of North Staffordshire, it was granted university status by Royal Charter as the University of Keele in 1962.

Keele occupies a 625-acre (253-hectare) rural campus close to the village of Keele and includes extensive woods, lakes and Keele Hall set in the Staffordshire Potteries. It has a science park and a conference centre, and is the largest campus university in the UK.The university's Medical School operates the clinical part of its courses from a separate campus at the Royal Stoke University Hospital. The School of Nursing and Midwifery is based at the nearby Clinical Education Centre.

Establishment

Cambridge and Oxford Extension Lectures had been arranged in the Potteries since the 1890s, but outside any organised educational framework or establishment. In 1904, funds were raised by local industrialists to support teaching by the creation of a North Staffordshire College, but the project, without the backing of Staffordshire County Council, was abandoned.

By the late 1930s the Staffordshire towns of Longton, Fenton, Burslem, Hanley had grown into the largest conurbation without some form of university provision. A large area including Staffordshire, Shropshire and parts of Cheshire and Derbyshire did not have its own university. Stoke, in particular, demanded highly qualified graduates for the regional pottery and mining industries and also additional social workers, teachers and administrators. A. D. Lindsay, Professor of Philosophy and Master of Balliol College, Oxford, was a strong advocate of working-class adult education and suggested a "people's university" in an address to the North Staffordshire Workers' Educational Association in 1925