The Surrey Institution was an organisation devoted to scientific education and research, based in London. It was founded by private subscription in 1807, taking the Royal Institution - founded in 1799 - as a model. Early meetings were held at the London coffee house on Ludgate Hill.

The Institution offered members and visitors lectures on a variety of subjects, the earliest of which included chemistry, minerology and natural philosophy, given by employed and visiting scientists, scholars and artists. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, lectured on the belles lettres in 1812-13;; William Hazlitt, on the English Poets in 1817; Goldsworthy Gurney found employment there in 1822, and there devised an improved blowpipe for which he won some renown.

The institution determined upon its name after a property convenient for its needs was found on Blackfriars Road on the south side of the Thames, at the time part of the county of Surrey. The building had been the final home of the Leverian Museum, housing the collection of Sir Ashton Lever, but had fallen into disrepair. The institution renovated it to include a large lecture hall capable of accommodating 500 people, and a galleried library of 60' length; it opened on the 1st May 1808. Other facilities in the building included committee rooms; a library with lending facilities; a reading room, chemical laboratory and contemporary philosophical apparatus. Costs were met by an initial 458 subscribers contributing thirty guinea each. The library had more than 5000 volumes by 1810.

The Institution lasted only until 1823, when it was dissolved, the building thereafter being used for a variety of entertainment ventures until 1855, when it was put to ordinary business use.

References

1. The Microcosm of London Rudolph Ackermann, 1811, reprinted by Methuen, 1904, pages 154-160
2. The History and Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark and Parts Adjacent, Thomas Allen, Jaques and Wright, 1827 - 1829, pages 542-3
3. Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, &c., , Henry Crabb Robinson, University Press 1922, page 134
4. Lectures On the English Poets, Delivered at the Surrey Institution William Hazlitt, Taylor and Hessey, 1819, title page
5. Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, Macmillan & Co, 1890, page 358
6. Old and New London, George Walter Thornbury, Cassell & Company, page 382
7. A History of the Surrey Institution, F. Kurzer, in Annals of Science, Volume 57, Number 2, 1 April 2000 , pp. 109-141(33)