Franklin left King's College London in mid-March 1953 for Birkbeck College, in a move that had been planned for some time and that she described (in a letter to Adrienne Weill in Paris) as "moving from a palace to the slums ... but pleasanter all the same". She was recruited by physics department chair John Desmond Bernal, a crystallographer who was a communist, known for promoting women crystallographers. Her new laboratories were housed in 21 Torrington Square, one of a pair of dilapidated and cramped Georgian houses containing several different departments; Franklin frequently took Bernal to task over the careless attitudes of some of the other laboratory staff, notably after workers in the pharmacy department flooded her first-floor laboratory with water on one occasion.