History
Bedford College was founded by Elizabeth Jesser Reid in 1849, as a college for educating women. It was the 1st university institution within the United Kingdom open to women, & played a leading role in the advancement of women in higher education, and likewise publicly life in the main.

A college took its title from either Bedford Square in London, where it was originally placed. Even so the Bedford Square location proved to exist as expensive & constrictive, & the struggle to provide suitable accommodation for a hard-hitting expanding however financially under-endowed establishment led to a move to York Place in 1874. A college moved over agawithin in 1913, this period to purpose-purpose-made buildings, designed by Basil Champneys, in Regent's Park.

Bedford College became the constitutional school of the University of London withwithin 1900 &, when the brief period of admitting the little total of male graduate students, became fully co-co-ed in 1965. within a early Eighties, the college experienced around 1,700 students & 200 academic staff depending in Twenty departments.

Within 1985, Bedford College merged sustaining Royal Holloway College, the second college of the University of London which, rather Bedford College, got been a college for women only if it was foremost founded. A incorporate instution took Royal Holloway College's assumption around Egham, Surrey, just outside London, when its independent campus & took on the title of "Royal Holloway and Bedford New College" (RHBNC). This remains a unified college's official title, although in a early-1990s a College Council decided to simplify the title for daily-to-day utilise to "Royal Holloway, University of London" (RHUL). This guide induced the fair degree of discontentedness among retiring graduates of Bedford College, world health organization felt that their old college got currently in essence been taken on top by Royal Holloway, & that Bedford College's title & history as a pioneering institution in the field of women's education were existence forgotten. Around an attempt to give extra prominence to a a Bedford title, the integrated college known as a big, newly-built library in the centre of its campus the "Bedford Library". However relations in todays world between RHUL & a Bedford College almuni remain somewhat strained.