the lecture centre, were designed in the brutalist style of architecture by Richard Sheppard, Robson & Partners, Architects.
The Uxbridge (Vine Street) railway branch line was closed in 1964, and the college purchased the land adjacent to its site where the railway had run for £65,000 from the local council.
=== 1966 to present ===
A royal charter granting university status and the power to award degrees was awarded on 9 June 1966, and the institution became Brunel University.
The university continued to use both campuses until 1971, when it left the Acton site. In 1980, the university merged with Shoreditch College of Education (Shoreditch Training College), located at Cooper's Hill, Runnymede, which became Brunel's second campus.
In 1995, the university expanded again, integrating the West London Institute of Higher Education, and adding campuses in Osterley and Twickenham, and increasing the number of courses that the university was able to offer. Traditionally the university's strengths were in engineering, science, and technology, but with the addition of the West London Institute, new departments such as arts, humanities, geography and earth science, health and sports science were added, and the size of the student body increased to over 12,000.
Brunel has been the subject of controversy as its approach to higher education has been both market-driven and politically conservative. The decision to award an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher in 1996, following the University of Oxford's refusal to do so, provoked an outcry by staff and students and, as a result, the ceremony had to be held in the House of Lords instead of on campus. In the late 1990s, the departments of physics, chemistry and materials engineering were all closed and in 2004 the then vice-chancellor, Steven Schwartz, initiated the reorganisation of the university's faculties and departments into schools, and closed the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences. The succeeding vice-chancellor, the sociologist Christopher Jenks, took office …
