Morley College is an adult education college in south London.
Morley College 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.
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.
The original Victorian college building was extended by Sir Edward Maufe in 1937. The Victorian building was destroyed in the Blitz in 1940 but Maufe’s 1930s extension survived. The remains of the Victorian building were cleared and a new college building designed by Charles Cowles-Voysey and Brandon Jones was completed in 1958 and opened by Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother. It was decorated by fabulous murals by Edward Bawden, John Piper (artist) and Martin Froy. A further bronze curtain-wall extension followed in 1973 designed by John Winter, and another in 1982 clad in corrugates Corten-steel, on the eastern side of King Edward’s Walk.
Gustav Holst was Music Director at the college from 1907 to 1924 and its main music room is named after him. Michael Tippett was director of music at Morley College from 1940 to 1951. His first connection with the College was as conductor of an orchestra of unemployed musicians, who gave the first performance of one of his best loved early works, the Concerto for Double String Orchestra.
The Theatre School enjoyed success during the 1980s and early 1990s under the direction of Paul A Thompson and Brian Croucher.
Morley Gallery opened in 1968 as part of the Arts Centre in Morley College. The Arts Centre, situated in an old pub adjacent to the main College building, has a painting and drawing studio and a print studio on the first, second and third floors. Morley Gallery occupies the whole of the ground floor with six imposing windows facing Westminster Bridge Road and King Edward Walk.
Morley College is an adult education college in south London.
