The story
Foundation
The university was the successor to University College Bristol, founded in 1876. The college was open from the start to both men and women, and opened with 99 day students (30 men and 69 women) and 243 evening students (143 men and 95 women). The university college was the first such institution in the country to admit women on the same basis as men. The botanic garden was established in 1882, originally adjacent to the university college in Clifton. In 1893 Bristol Medical School (founded 1833) merged with the university college. However, women were forbidden to take examinations in medicine until 1906.
The engineering department of the Merchant Venturers' Technical College (founded as Bristol Trade and Mining School in 1856) became the engineering faculty of Bristol University in 1909 following disputes with the university college in the 1890s, being finally merged in to the university in 1949.
The university college was able to apply for a royal charter due to the financial support of the Wills and Fry families, who made their fortunes in tobacco plantations and chocolate respectively (while there was no funding to the university college from Edward Colston, the trade school that became the Merchant Venturers' Technical College and then the university's engineering faculty was run by the Colston Trustees until 1885). A 2018 study commissioned by the university estimated 85% of the philanthropic funds used for the institution's foundation "depended on the labour of enslaved people".
Early years
In 1908, gifts from the Fry and Wills families, particularly £100,000 from Henry Overton Wills III (£6m in today's money), were provided to endow a university for Bristol and the West of England, provided that a royal charter could be obtained within two years. In December 1909, the king granted the charter. Henry Wills became its first chancellor and Conwy Lloyd Morgan the first vice-chancellor. Wills died in 1911 and in tribute his sons George and Harry built the Wills Memorial Building, started in 1913 and completed in 1925.
In 1920, George Wills bought the Victoria Rooms and endowed them to the university as a students' union.
Paul Dirac graduated from Bristol in 1921 with a degree in engineering, before obtaining a second degree in mathematics in 1923 from Cambridge. For his subsequent pioneering work on quantum mechanics, he was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics. Later in the 1920s, the H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory was opened by Ernest Rutherford.
The students' union was formed in October 1924 by the merger of the university guild and the university club.
Winston Churchill became the university's third chancellor in 1929, serving the university in that capacity until 1965. He succeeded Richard Haldane, who had held the office from 1912 following the death of Henry Wills.
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During World War II, the Wills Memorial was bombed in the Bristol Blitz, destroying the great hall and its organ along with thousands of books from the library of King's College London that had been moved to Bristol for safe keeping. The great hall did not reopen until 1963.
Post-war development
In 1947, the university established the first degree in drama in the country. In the same year, Bristol began offering special entrance exams and grants to aid the resettlement of servicemen returning home.
In 1965, the students' union moved to the Richmond Building. This has been noted as an example of the trend to students' union buildings "of vast proportions" in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1968, Bristol students held a sit-in as part of a national campaign for students to have more representation on university governing bodies and for widening access. In Bristol they also called for students from other establishments in the city to be allowed to join the union.
A series of chancellors and vice-chancellors led the university through these decades, with Henry Somerset, 10th Duke of Beaufort taking over from Churchill as chancellor in 1965 before being succeeded by Dorothy Hodgkin in 1970 who spent the next 18 years in the office.
One of the few centres for deaf studies in the United Kingdom was established in Bristol in 1981, followed in 1988 by the Norah Fry Centre for research into learning difficulties.
In 1989, Sir Jeremy Morse, then chairman of Lloyds Bank, became chancellor.
21st century
Growth in the number of postgraduate students lead to the establishment of the postgraduate union in 2000.
In 2002, the university was involved in an argument over press intrusion after details of then-prime minister Tony Blair's son's application to university were published in national newspapers. In the same year, the university opened the new Centre for Sports, Exercise and Health in the university precinct. At a cost, local residents can also use the facilities.
Brenda Hale, the first female Law Lord, became chancellor of the university in 2003. Paul Nurse succeeded Lady Hale as chancellor on 1 January 2017.
In 2004, the Faculty of Engineering completed work on the Bristol Laboratory for Advanced Dynamics Engineering (BLADE), It was built as an extension to the Queen's Building and was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in March 2005.
In January 2005, the School of Chemistry was awarded £4.5m by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to create Bristol ChemLabS: a Centre for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (CETL), with an additional £350k announced for the capital part of the project in February 2006. Bristol ChemLabS stands for Bristol Chemical Laboratory Sciences; it is the only chemistry CETL in the UK.
September 2009 saw the opening of the university's Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information.
Redevelopment of the centre of the university precinct began in September 2011, with the start of construction of a new life sciences building.
In 2018 while building work was underway in the Fry Building, the building caught fire.
In 2022, a judge found that the University of Bristol had contributed to a student's death by failing to make reasonable accommodations.
In October 2021, Bristol dismissed Professor David Miller following accusations of antisemitism and an internal investigation. An employment tribunal found in February 2024 that his anti-Zionist beliefs were protected under equality law. The University of Bristol unsuccessfully appealed the ruling at the Employment Appeal Tribunal in February 2025.
In 2024 the university revised their emblem, removing the dolphin emblem because of its connection to the slave trader Edward Colston and adding an image of moving pages and a bookmark.
In 2025, BristolSEDS, a student society within the university, successfully hot-fired a 6 kilonewton bi-propellant rocket engine, claiming the record for the highest thrust of an engine of this type designed by students in the UK.
From Wikipedia’s article on University of Bristol, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5