The lineage begins in 1843, when the Nottingham Government School of Design opened as one of the earliest such institutions in the UK - part of a national push to wed art education to manufacturing. That school still exists, folded inside the modern School of Art & Design. After the Second World War, technical and teacher-training colleges proliferated in Nottingham: the Technical College in 1945, the Regional College of Technology in 1958, the College of Education at Clifton in 1959. By 1970 these strands had been pulled together into Trent Polytechnic. The new polytechnic absorbed the College of Education in 1975 and was renamed Nottingham Polytechnic in 1988. In 1992, on the wave of reforms that converted polytechnics into universities, it took its current name - and Professor Ray Cowell, the first Vice-Chancellor, was given the job of holding together what had become a very large institution very quickly.

The university now operates across five sites that feel like five different schools. City Campus, just north of the centre, holds the Arkwright Building and the 1958 Newton - one of the tallest buildings in Nottingham, opened by Princess Alexandra of Kent - alongside the £13 million Boots Library. Clifton, four miles south, is the science and technology campus, with the John van Geest Cancer Research Centre, an Anthony Nolan Trust cord blood bank, and the Trent Astronomical Observatory, opened in 2006 and recognised by the International Astronomical Union. Brackenhurst, fifteen miles out in rural Southwell, is a 200-hectare working farm with 250 animals from over 70 species, where students study equine science and endangered species conservation. The Creative Quarter east of the centre is built around Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies, bought by NTU in 2015 - music studios, an esports venue, TV studios. NTU London opened in Whitechapel in 2023, and NTU in Mansfield serves the former coalfields.

The awards have come quickly. Times Higher Education named NTU University of the Year in 2017, The Guardian followed in 2019, and The Times and Sunday Times called it Modern University of the Year in 2018 and 2022. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, 86 per cent of NTU's submitted research impact was rated world-leading or internationally excellent - the case studies ranging from AI-accelerated drug discovery to high-energy X-ray imaging for next-generation security screening. The Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education arrived in 2015 and again in 2021. None of this is the trajectory you would predict for a former technical college whose oldest ancestor was teaching draughtsmanship to lacemakers' apprentices.

In 2009, The People & Planet Green League named NTU 'the most environmentally friendly university in the UK', and the university has run on 100 per cent renewable electricity ever since. Between 2009 and 2012, it received four First Class awards from the Green League. Fairtrade products are stocked across campus shops; the university's branded T-shirts are made from Fairtrade cotton. In June 2024 the university's Newton Building hosted the final televised head-to-head debate of the UK general election campaign, between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, broadcast nationally by the BBC. Inside the Newton Building's mid-century Art Deco shell, the country argued with itself about its future. The students kept showing up to class the next day.