Becoming one of three universities charging British and EU undergraduates less than £3,000 a year was a gamble that appeared not to pay off in the first year of top-up fees.

Applications dropped in any case, but they have since been recovering.

The university was enjoying an above-average increase of 8.5 per cent when the official deadline passed for courses beginning in 2009, when fees for degree courses will reach £2,900 (other than in pharmacy, where the full £3,225 will be charged).

The aim is to strike a balance between affordability for the maximum number of students and the need to invest in the university.

Multimedia

• The Times University Guide table

Related Links

• The University of Greenwich

Multimedia

• University of Greenwich home page

Baroque

The university’s move, completed in 2002, into the former Royal Naval College buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren provided a campus worthy of one of the most desirable titles in the higher education world.

Its name has always conjured up images of history and science in equal measure, and the main campus is now part of a World Heritage site.

Wren’s baroque masterpiece is being used, with the former Dreadnought Hospital, to teach over half the university’s students in humanities, business, law, maths, computing, and maritime studies. Four halls provide more than 1,300 places.

Regional partnership

Under the leadership of Baroness Blackstone, the former Higher Education Minister, Greenwich has dropped the soubriquet of “regional university” but still draws primarily from southeast London and Kent, a populous county that until recently had only a single university.

The prize-winning Medway campus, centred on the former naval base at Chatham, has been developed in partnership with Kent and Canterbury Christ Church universities.

New student accommodation for an additional 140 students opened there in 2008, together with an improved café for Greenwich students in the main Pembroke building.

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