University College London

University College London stands in Bloomsbury, a quiet square-mile of London where Georgian terraces and plane trees frame the main quadrangle. The campus mixes 19th-century porticoes with modern glass atriums, and the streets around hold bookshops, museums and teaching hospitals. The university began in 1826 as London University, the first in England to teach students of any faith and the first to open its doors to women in 1878.

Its founders drew on the radical ideas of Jeremy Bentham, who bought a share and is remembered as the spiritual father of the college. The first professor of political economy, John Ramsay McCulloch, taught in 1828, and Alexander Maconochie became Britain’s first professor of geography in 1833. The Slade School of Fine Art opened in 1871, and University College Hospital began training doctors in 1834. Today the college belongs to the federal University of London and runs eleven faculties across more than a hundred departments.

Visitors walk through the main quadrangle past Bentham’s preserved auto-icon in a glass case. The Grant Museum of Zoology displays skeletons and specimens in glass jars, while the Petrie Museum holds more than eighty thousand Egyptian artefacts. The college also administers the Orwell Prize for political writing and houses the Slade’s studios where artists such as Coldplay’s Chris Martin studied. The surrounding streets offer cafés and second-hand bookshops, and the hospital buildings still serve patients and students alike.