Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh

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Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh is committed to providing thoroughly relevant teaching and research. Our research is focused on making a real practical impact on everyday life, and our courses are designed to produce well prepared, well rounded, and flexible graduates. We have widely recognized expertise in health and rehabilitation, sustainable business and creativity, and culture. In this section of our website, you can find out about the university's history, along with information about governance, the Principal and Vice-Chancellor, the senior management team, and our collaborative partners. You will also find practical information, including travel and transport information and policy and strategy documents.
Our mission is to foster intellectual capital with both a theoretical and practical focus, giving students and staff the confidence to make a real difference to the world around them. We are known for excellent, relevant teaching, research, knowledge exchange, and the care and respect we give our students, staff, and partners. As a thriving campus university, we strive to create a community without borders, improving people's lives locally, nationally, and internationally. We are ambitious and enterprising, and, in everything we do, we are committed to social justice.
At Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, our vision is to be a university of ideas and influence.
Outward looking, we are responsive to society's changing needs and make a real difference in the world. We have widely recognized expertise in health & rehabilitation, sustainable business, and creativity & culture.
Our research and knowledge exchange work is focused on making a real practical impact on everyday life.
In this section of our website, you can find out about the university's history, along with information about governance, the Principal and Vice-Chancellor, the senior management team, and our collaborative partners.
We have a proud history of achievement and progress extending for well over a century.
Founded in 1875, we have always been driven by the highest ideals and purposes, focusing on contributing to practical ways of improving people's lives and serving the community.
The institution now named Queen Margaret University was established as the Edinburgh School of Cookery in 1875.
(1) To provide educational opportunities for women. The institution's founders were part of the U.K.-wide mid-Victorian "Women's Movement", which was a campaign for better education and improved career opportunities for females. The main element of this campaign was to secure equality of opportunity for school girls. However, another purpose was to open up post-school education at both university and technical levels. To this point, young women had been excluded from higher and technical education, with an inevitable consequence being widespread female poverty.
The original lectures took place (before huge audiences) in the Royal Museum in Edinburgh's Chambers Street. However, it was at first peripatetic in nature. Teaching staff went out with mobile gas and paraffin cooking equipment to give public lectures and demonstrations all over Britain, from the Shetlands to the Channel Islands. The first generation of lecturers were almost all young women aged in their early twenties, and almost everywhere they went, they drew large gatherings of women eager for instruction.
The first permanent site was in Shandwick Place, where the institution was based from 1877 to 1891. At this time, the institution also operated a branch in Manchester to provide lectures to industrial communities throughout England. As was intended by the founders, this branch eventually became independent, and it is now a constituent part of Manchester Metropolitan University. In setting up the School of Cookery, they were backed by various interest groups, particularly enlightened local medical practitioners and Church leaders.
In 1879 Guthrie Wright collaborated with the scientist Sir Thomas Dyke Acland and two "distinguished medical doctors" (probably Dr. Henry Littlejohn - Edinburgh's first Medical Officer of Health - and Dr. Alexander Wood) to produce her School Cookery Book. Published as part of a series of science primers under the general editorship of the naturalist, Professor T.H. Huxley, and including texts by such individuals as Sir H. E. Roscoe (chemistry), Sir Archibald Geikie (geography and geology), and W. Stanley Jevons (logic and political economy), Guthrie Wright's book effectively represented the state of knowledge at the time regarding food. It subsequently ran into many editions.
About 1887, Guthrie Wright Louisa Stevenson and Princess Louise collaborated in developing in Scotland Queen Victoria's Jubilee Institute for Nurses. Also, an entirely voluntary body, the organization established training and residential facilities in Edinburgh and Glasgow to prepare nurses to provide care to the sick poor in their own homes. Effectively this was the beginning of the district nursing service, and it was a vital initiative in the period before the creation of the National Health Service.
In 1891 the School moved to Atholl Crescent in Edinburgh and, over the next fifty years or so, gradually extended its premises along the Crescent. At different times it also had properties in other locations in Edinburgh, including Rothesay Terrace, and it ran industrial classes in the India Buildings in the city's Victoria Street.
(Male-dominated school boards did not want to find the money to install cooking equipment and did not want to pay for the ingredients that the children would require to use.) However, medical studies in the early 1900s showed that thousands of urban children all over the U.K. were desperately undernourished and unhealthy.
One of the most influential pioneering investigations was conducted by the Medical Inspector at the Scottish Office, Sir W. Leslie MacKenzie, and his wife Helen, a lecturer in the School (and, later, Chairman of Governors).
The student population proliferated over the next few years, and the Atholl Crescent became world-renowned as setting the standards for domestic science teachers' training. Today, QMU's vision is to be a university of ideas and influence.
We aim to provide a transformative learning experience for our students, enabling them to achieve their individual goals and contribute to society. We seek to provide the optimal balance of theoretical and practical education.
We are dedicated to improving the quality of life and building evidence-based policy and practice through our research and knowledge exchange (KE). We are recognized internationally for our high quality and relevant research, which informs practice and policy, and we measure its value by its impact and social usefulness.
Through our teaching and research, we enable people to heal, nurture, care, and communicate. We inspire people to build businesses, find solutions to real-life issues, and to improve communities. We foster creativity and artistic expression, building social capital. Our graduates and staff can found influential roles worldwide, influencing policy and enhancing society, culture, and the economy.

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