Warwick Business School has completed its agreement to open a London base at The Shard – the tallest building in the European Union.

WBS will have teaching space on the 17th floor of the 87-storey Shard, which stands at 306 metres high and is at the heart of the London Bridge Quarter neighbourhood, one of London’s most vibrant districts.

Evening courses for MSc Finance and MSc Human Resource Management & Employment Relations will be taught at The Shard with plans to run the Warwick Executive MBA from there as well. The base at The Shard will house a 100-seat lecture theatre and a smaller one at 60 seats, plus eight seminar rooms and an IT lab, with courses due to start in January 2015.

Watch the video: WBS reaching new heights at The Shard

Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano and opened in July 2012, The Shard is just minutes from the City, the financial capital of the world.

WBS Dean Mark Taylor said:

This is a very exciting development for the School and to take premises in one of London’s most iconic buildings is a tremendous moment for Warwick.

London is one of the great capitals of the world and a global financial centre, so it seems only right that one of Europe’s top business schools should have a presence there. We will bring our academic excellence to London to help form the business leaders and the City’s professionals of the future.

Our MSc Finance course is ranked number one in the UK and the Warwick Executive MBA is firmly in the world’s top 25.

The University of Warwick has a great history of being entrepreneurial and a world innovator, and this move to The Shard continues that spirit of enterprise and ambition to do things differently.

The Shard is a spectacular sight on the London skyline and is a fitting base for Warwick Business School, which has creativity at the heart of its business teachings.

Founded in 1967 WBS currently attracts 6,500 students from 125 different countries and has recently begun work on a £30m state-of-the-art extension of its current facilities. The Warwick MBA by distance learning was ranked second in the world by the Financial Times, who also rated the Warwick MBA by full-time study in the world’s top 25.

We want to become the leading university-based business school in Europe and a campus at The Shard will be another step towards that,

said Professor Taylor, who worked in the City as a managing director for BlackRock before taking over as Dean at WBS in 2010.

We are already in Europe’s top bracket, but we want to keep pushing upwards and a presence in London will help us do that. Our mission is to produce and disseminate world-class research and world-class business leaders, plus provide a lifelong return on investment for our students and alumni.

Find out how you can make use of our London base at The Shard