Bellerbys College - History

History

Bellerbys College dates back to Davies’s College, founded in London in 1927. Davies’s College was originally set up to prepare students for entrance to Oxford and Cambridge, the Armed Services and the Civil Service. A second branch of Davies’s College was founded in Hove in 1959. Davies’s Tutorial College in Hove as it was then called was based in premises at 44 Cromwell Road in Hove. The college was a tutorial college providing A-levels and A-Level re-sits mainly for British students.

In 1980 Mr Robin Bellerby became principal of Davies College in Hove and the college expanded to occupy neighbouring premises on Cromwell Road. At this time the college expanded its recruitment overseas and the college made links with the Jordanian government, leading to over 30 students from Jordan coming each year to study A Levels on government scholarships. Other students at the college came from Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Later the college was renamed Bellerbys College after the principal became the new owner. In 1991 the college was bought by a group of British businessmen who invested money in recruitment overseas and developed the foundation programme, a one year bridging course enabling international students to enter UK universities at first-year undergraduate level.

The original Davies’s College in London, which was located at 25 Old Gloucester Street, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London, continued to operate independently of the college in Brighton until its closure in 1998.

In 1994 the business together with the Embassy schools became British Study Group, later Study Group International, later to become owned by the Daily Mail Group before being sold on to the Australian Champ group.

In 1996 Bellerbys opened a campus in the north of Cambridge and the following year took over a school in Wadhurst, East Sussex, expanding to cater to growing demand for British education overseas. Then in 1998 a London centre opened on the campus of the Roehampton Institute, University of Surrey (later Roehampton University). The college was based in Downshire House, a grade II Listed building in Roehampton, for four years until moving to custom-built premises in Greenwich which it today shares with Study Group sister company Embassy CES. Bellerbys Cambridge added its Queens Campus in 1999 and an Oxford campus opened on Broad Street in 2002.

In August 2011, four Russian college students who raped an 18-year-old woman were jailed for a total of 35 years. The attack took place on 23 January 2011 in Bounty House, Greenwich, where the defendants were living at the time.