[1] The Great Hall was officially opened by the Lord Mayor of London in 1897, as a social and academic events space catering for dances and recitals.

When electronic dance music and the club scene took hold at the turn of the decade, it was relaunched as the Rocket complex and became one of London's leading all-nighter venues.

In 2015, the Great Hall had its name and grandeur restored, with the Rocket now referring exclusively to the ground floor café bar and adjacent courtyard garden.

In 2000, the university awarded an honorary degree to Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town and primate of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, in a special ceremony.

Under the terms of its royal charter, its objective was "to promote the industrial skill, general knowledge, health and well-being of young men and women belonging to the poorer classes of Islington [and] to provide for the inhabitants of Islington and the neighbouring parts of north London, and especially for the Industrial Classes, the means of acquiring a sound General, Scientific, Technical and Commercial Education at small cost.

[10] Two student leaders were sent to prison for 16 days for contempt of the court order preventing them from barring Harrington and the Secretary of State for Education, Sir Keith Joseph, threatened to close the polytechnic down.

[11] In December, David MacDowall, then director, resigned after pressure from the Inner London Education Authority to make a complaint against Harrington for remarks he made in a radio interview.

[14] In January 1985, with a new director, John Beishon, in post and final examinations approaching, the polytechnic, students' union and Harrington agreed a deal in which his classes would be taught separately in another building.

The 1997 Mike Leigh film Career Girls is about a reunion between two women who shared a flat six years earlier whilst studying at the Polytechnic of North London.