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Chair of the Governors of the Borough Polytechnic Institute, 1892-1905. Born in Bath, he attended Oriel College, Oxford, graduating in 1867. In that year he was resident in London and applied to become a solicitor. By 1875 he was living in Southwark, and a partner in a legal practice. In 1881 he was clerk of St Olave District Board of Works.

In 1885 he was elected to the London School Board as one of the representatives of Southwark, holding the seat until 1891. At this time the Charity Commissioners were empowered to take control of various charitable funds held by depopulated City of London parishes and redistribute them to "to improve the physical and moral condition" of residents of the Metropolis. Bayley set up the South London Polytechnic Institutes Council in 1887, whose members included the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor of London. Evan Spicer became its chairman and the Prince of Wales the president of the council. In 1888 the Charity Commissioners agreed to provide match funds up to £150,000 to establish three polytechnics in South London. Eventually only two polytechnics: Battersea and Borough were established. Bayley was the first chairman of the board of governors of Borough Polytechnic which was officially by Lord Rosebery on 30 September 1892.

Bayley, having stood down from the school board in November 1891, was elected to the London County Council as a Progressive Party councillor for Southwark West. He held the seat until 1907.

He died at his home in Phillimore Gardens, Kensington, in July 1920 aged 78, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.

Principal of South Bank Polytechnic (1987-1992) and Vice-Chancellor of South Bank University (1992-1993).

Principal, 1892-1922.

Vice-Chancellor of South Bank University (1993-2001). He became a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1984.
In November 2004 he was made an honorary Doctor of Education of the University.

Frank von Hippel is a theoretical physicist. Frank received his B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Insti­tute of Technology in 1959 and a D.Phil. in theoretical physics in 1962 from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. For the following ten years, his research was primarily in theoretical elementary-particle physics, and he held research positions at the University of Chi­cago, Cornell University, and Argonne National Laboratory, and served on the physics faculty at Stanford University.

In 1974, Frank’s interests shifted to “public policy physics.” He spent a year as a resident fellow at the National Academy of Sciences, where he organized the American Physical Society’s study on light-water reactor safety. He was then invited to join the Princeton research staff in 1974 and in 1983 was appointed to the teaching faculty at Princeton at the rank of professor.

Frank has worked on policy proposals relating to the control of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) for more than three decades, including initiatives to end the production of plutonium and HEU for weapons (Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty); the use of highly enriched uranium as a reactor fuel (the Global Threat Reduction Initia­tive); and plutonium separation from spent nuclear fuel.

From 1983 to 1991, while Frank was chairman of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the FAS Fund, he partnered with the Committee of Soviet Scientists for Peace and Against the Nuclear Threat (chaired by Evgenyi Velikhov) to help provide technical support for Mikhail Gorbachev’s initiatives to achieve a Comprehensive Test Ban, and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces and Strategic Arms Reductions Treaties.

From 1993 to 1994, he served as assistant director for national se­curity in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and played a major role in developing what is now called the International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation Program.

In 2006, Frank co-founded and is currently co-chair of the non­governmental International Panel on Fissile Materials, which includes experts from 17 countries and develops proposals for initiatives to re­duce global stocks of plutonium and HEU and the numbers of locations where they can be found.

Barbara Goss Levi earned a PhD in particle physics from Stanford University in 1971. For most of the past 30 years, she has written for Physics Today magazine, reporting on new discoveries at the frontiers of physics. After rising to senior editor, she was in charge of Physics Today's news section, "Search and Discovery". In January of 2003, she stepped down from that post and now serves as a contributing editor. Her stories cover the full range of topics in physics today, from atomic to astrophysics, from condensed matter to geophysics.

Because of Dr. Levi's interest in issues at the interface of physics and society, she became a consultant for the US Congress' Office of Technology Assessment, from the late 1970s to the Office's closure in 1995. From 1981 to 1987, Dr. Levi was a member of the research staff at Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies. Her work there on arms control and the effects of nuclear weapons resulted in, among others, two articles in Scientific American.

John Constable is an English playwright, poet, performer and activist, author of The Southwark Mysteries. He is also known as John Crow, the urban shaman of Cross Bones.

John Constable was made an honorary fellow of the University in 2010.

South Bank Polytechnic staff

David Grayson was made an Honorary Doctor of Laws of the University in 2005. He is a former chairman of the charity Carers UK championing the role of 6.5million Britons caring for a loved one; and of one of the UK's larger social enterprises and largest eldercare providers, Housing 21 during which the organisation made corporate history by becoming the first-ever not-for-profit successfully to acquire a publicly quoted group of companies. David received an OBE for services to industry in 1994 and a CBE for services to disability in 1999.

Anne Owers was made an Honorary Fellow of the University in 2005.

Dame Anne Owers DBE was the first woman to be appointed to the post of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons. But more significantly, she was one of the most renowned campaigners for human rights and law reform.

Anne Owers was educated at Washington Grammar School County Durham before going on to study at Girton College, Cambridge from where she graduated with a degree in History. From 1968 to 1971 she taught in Zambia undertook research for a PhD in African History. For four years from 1981 she worked as a researcher at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, and then she held the post of General Secretary there until 1992.

During her distinguished career she has chaired the Board of Trustees of the Refugee Legal Centre between 1993 and 1996. She was a Member of the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct from 1997 to 1999 and after that a member of the Home Office's Task Force on the Human Rights Act for two years. In addition, she served on the Legal Services Consultative Panel from 2000 to 2001.

However it was as the Director of the human rights and law reform group Justice from 1992 to 2001 that she gained national recognition as a Human Rights campaigner. Under her, Justice (which boasts 300 judges among its members) produced reports urging reform of the law in many important areas: investigating miscarriages of justice, life sentences, juvenile justice, and asylum law. Justice supported key cases in international and domestic courts, for example, to remove Ministers' powers to determine the length of detention for individual life sentenced prisoners.

Many believe that Anne's background has labelled her an "outsider"; a status she believes is an "advantage", allowing her a fresh perspective on her work. The plight of prisoners was one of Justice's main concerns. Perhaps her greatest achievement during her time at Justice was to help secure the setting up of the Criminal Cases Review Commission which was created to investigate more effectively possible miscarriages of justice.

Anne's reports on the conditions and treatment of inmates in prisons and immigration detention centres have shed light into these hidden places. Building on four key tests – that prisoners and detainees should be held safely, treated with respect, allowed to engage in purposeful activity and prepared for release – she has succeeded in improving conditions in individual prisons, and highlighted the effects of prison overcrowding. She has drawn particular attention to suicides in prison, the treatment of children, the extent of mental illness among prisoners, and the need for effective rehabilitation. Under her, the Inspectorate has developed human rights based criteria which are accepted internationally, and have been used outside England and Wales. Using the same approach, her reports into immigration detention facilities have exposed shortcomings and achieved some improvements.

Anne Owers has contributed much to the cause of human rights through her work both in the past, and in her current role as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons. She has raised the profile of prison reform and contributed to the protection of the human rights of all detainees in this country. She has also maintained her commitment to issues of diversity which she first became involved with in the 1970s as part of the Race Relations Commission in the diocese of Southwark.

Garth Crooks was made an Honorary Fellow of the University in 2007.

In May 1981, Garth Crooks was the first black player to score in an FA Cup Final. By the time he retired from the game in 1990 he'd scored more than 200 goals. His broadcasting career began in 1982 when he joined the BBC sports team as a television pundit, and his services to Association Football were recognised in 1999 when he was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

Professor Miriam David has a BA (Hons), Sociology from the University of Leeds 1966;, and a PhD from the University of London 1975.

Lawrence Hadley was born in London in 1925, and evacuated to Minehead at the outbreak of the Second World War. On his return to London he became an apprentice with a mechanical engineering contractor in central London. During his apprenticeship he studied at the Borough Polytechnic between 1941 and 1946, including the heating and ventilating engineering intensive course in 1944. These courses became the foundation of the National College of Heating, Ventilating, Refrigeration and Fan Engineering when it opened in 1948.
He wrote 60 years later: “I recall my main tutors then being Mr Harwood and Mr Cowan, who managed to keep our attention in spite of the regular flying bombs overhead. I don’t recall the class ever retreating to the shelters – just a quick duck under the desk.”

After completing his apprenticeship he joined Donald Smith and Partners, Consulting Engineers, the forerunner of DSSR. In a letter dated July 1946, confirming his appointment as a draughtsman, Donald Smith himself wrote: “We trust you will find your work for us congenial and can assure you that you will have ample opportunities for enlarging your experience”.

Laurie Hadley’s relationship with DSSR lasted 41 years. He was a partner for 30, and senior partner for six. He rapidly involved himself with a number of committees, sub-committees and working parties for professional institutes and learned bodies. He became a council member of the Association of Consulting Engineers, a member of the Institute of Healthcare Engineering and Estate Management in 1972, and later a Fellow, and became involved with a number of other engineering institutions, including the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers.

He became a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Plumbers in 1976 and was the livery company’s senior steward from 2002. In 1977 he was chairman of the National Joint Consultative Committee for Building, and in 1978 president of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers. He was elected president of IHEEM for the years 1983-1985 and to the same role at the International Federation of Hospital Engineering for the years 1998-2000.
In 1986 he was awarded the OBE for services to hospital engineering, and even after retirement he continued to support professional engineers - finally stepping down from the IHEEM Journal Committee in December 2006 and the Institute’s International Committee in January 2007. He died in 2008.

She was Secretary of State for Education and Science (1970-1974), Leader of the Opposition (1975-1979) and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1979-1990).