[5] Birkbeck's alumni and former and current staff include five Nobel laureates, numerous political leaders, members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and a British prime minister.

In 1823 Sir George Birkbeck, a physician and graduate of the University of Edinburgh who was a pioneer of adult education, founded the London Mechanics' Institute at a meeting in the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand.

In 1858 changes to the University of London's structure resulted in opening up access for the Institute's students to its examinations and its degrees.

[7] Other distinguished faculty in the years between the two world wars included Nikolaus Pevsner, J. D. Bernal and Cyril Joad.

[citation needed] During the Second World War Birkbeck was the only central University of London college not to be relocated outside the capital.

During the war the college organised lunch-time extramural lectures for the public, given by, among others, Joad, Pevsner and Harold Nicolson.

[9] In 2003, following a major redevelopment, its building in Malet Street was reopened by the Chancellor of the University of London, The Princess Royal.

Although it has held its own degree-awarding powers since 2012, Birkbeck has chosen to hold these in reserve, preferring to award University of London degrees.

In late October 2022 the University and College Union published a press release in which it stated that Birkbeck was planning to significantly reduce its staff because of a multi-million-pound deficit, in a restructuring that could lead to compulsory redundancies.

In the same release it was stated that the local UCU branch had passed a motion of no confidence in the senior leadership team.

The School of Arts, including the Department of English & Humanities, is housed in Virginia Woolf's former residence in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

(Other notable former residents of the house include John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell and Lydia Lopokova.)

[23][20] The college was previously organised into five schools comprising 19 departments, but it now consists of three faculties that comprise a total of nine schools: The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIR)[24] was established in 2004, with the renowned but controversial Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek appointed as International Director.

[26] 2004 also saw Birkbeck enter into a research and teaching collaboration with the Institute of Education, jointly founding the London Knowledge Lab.

[27] Meanwhile, the London Consortium, a graduate school that represents a collaboration between Birkbeck, the Tate Galleries, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Architectural Association, and, until 1999, the British Film Institute, has been running since the mid-1990s, offering master's and doctoral degrees in interdisciplinary humanities and cultural studies.

Its permanent and adjunct faculty has included Tom McCarthy, Colin MacCabe, Laura Mulvey, Steven Connor, Marina Warner, Juliet Mitchell, Stuart Hall, the late Roger Scruton, Salman Rushdie, Tilda Swinton as well as Slavoj Žižek.

This is a collaborative venture between Birkbeck and UCL, and is a leading academic centre for translating gene sequences and determining protein structure and function.

Birkbeck was ranked 13th in The Guardian's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and 26th in the Times Higher Education's equivalent table.