Whitelands College is one of the four constituent colleges of Roehampton University. One of the oldest higher education institutions in England, predating every university except Oxford, Cambridge, London and Durham, it was founded by the Church of England’s National Society in 1841 as a teacher training college for women.
Whitelands College was named for Whitelands House on the Kings Road in Chelsea, in which it was originally based. The college outgrew it and moved in the early 1930s to buildings by Giles Gilbert Scott in Southfields near Putney; the original Chelsea building was sold to the British Union of Fascists in summer 1933, where it became known as 'the Black House'.[1] In 1975, the College entered into an academic federation with three other south-west London teacher training colleges – Digby Stuart, Froebel and Southlands – to form the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education. In 2000 the Institute federated with the University of Surrey to become the University of Surrey, Roehampton. In 2005, Whitelands vacated the Southfields site and relocated to Roehampton, overlooking Richmond Park. The main building on the Southfield site was later converted to luxury housing.[2]