In March 1881, the month after women students received the right to sit the Natural Sciences Tripos at the University of Cambridge, twenty-two natural sciences students at Newnham College, Cambridge presented a memorial to the college's governing body outlining the need for more laboratory space.

[5] The laboratory opened for teaching in the spring of 1884, funded largely by Eleanor Sidgwick, Vice-Principal of Newnham College, and her sister Alice Blanche Balfour.

[6] It was named in memory of their brother Francis Maitland Balfour, a biologist who had been a supporter of Newnham College and a member of the committee negotiating to secure the building.

At first, the staff consisted only of director Alice Johnson, who had taken the Part I examination in Morphology, and Marion Greenwood, who taught physiology.

[10] There was also a "young untrained boy" to assist with setting up experiments, so the demonstrators did most of the work preparing specimens and reagents themselves.

[12] An average of forty students per year used the Balfour Laboratory in the 1880s, increasing to about sixty from 1896 when morphology, physics and geology were added to the programme.

[12] The Balfour laboratory closed for teaching in 1914, by which time women were being admitted to share practical facilities with men, and student numbers were declining due to World War I.