Georgina Brewis and Sam Blaxland
The first students enrolled at the new London University arrived at its neoclassical building in October 1828. Officially founded in February 1826, the institution that was in 1836 to be renamed as University College London (UCL) was located on a former rubbish dump just to the south of the so-called ‘New Road’ (now the Euston Road) – a site described snidely by the Tory-supporting satirical newspaper John Bull as ‘a large space of mud and nastiness’. While this was an unprepossessing start for London’s first university, its foundation is now widely acknowledged as a watershed moment in the story of British higher education and of vital significance for the history of London itself. Free from the religious tests and residential requirements of Oxford and Cambridge, the new institution offered a reasonably priced, ‘useful’ education to Britain’s nascent middle-class, appealing to students from across the world even in its early years.
Student London: A New History of Higher Education in the Capital seeks to shed new light on London’s history through a focus on students and higher education. General studies of the capital city tend to ignore London’s colleges and universities, while histories of higher education have tended to neglect students as a group. Indeed, scholars have often dismissed the experiences of the first London students because they resembled neither the established undergraduate culture of nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge, nor the mid-twentieth century models of student union activity they were familiar with. Many concluded the task was just too difficult. The process of recovering student life in London 200 years ago has been immensely challenging, but it was not impossible. We have read institutional records with fresh eyes alongside a diverse range of student-produced publications going back 200 years. Memory sources including memoir, biography and oral history shaped the book. We identified over 300 published and unpublished student memoirs, recorded new oral history interviews with 92 alumni ranging in age from 21 to 102, and reanalysed about 50 existing interviews. The book also draws on sources such as court records, secret service files, film, art and photography, fictionalised accounts and material culture.
This short film details the ‘making’ of the book
Student London is published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the founding of London’s first university and is the major outcome of a research and engagement project called ‘Generation UCL: Two Hundred Years of Student Life in London’, which ran between 2021 and 2026. After updating UCL’s official history The World of UCL in 2018, Georgina Brewis conceived of a new way to tell this story through the eyes of students since the 1820s. Sam Blaxland joined the team in 2022 from Swansea University fresh from writing a new post-war history of that institution. While funded by UCL and supported by Students’ Union UCL, we have been given a completely free hand to approach the research and writing of the book.
We chose to research student life not just at the original London University but at the many formerly independent higher education institutions that later merged with UCL, including the Middlesex Hospital Medical School (1835), the School of Pharmacy (1842), the London School of Medicine for Women/Royal Free Hospital Medical School (1874), the London Day Training College/Institute of Education (1902), the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (1915), the Institute of Archaeology (1937) and several other institutes. Together, these institutions helped us capture much of the diversity of higher education in London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Therefore, while we make no claim to write a comprehensive history of all London students since 1826, we do seek to write many of its students back into the story of the city.
Student London examines a broad range of topics including students’ everyday lives, fees and funding, collegiate cultures, social and political engagement, physical and mental health, recreation, sports and leisure. It also engages in much greater depth with London’s imperial history than earlier studies of higher education have done. In doing so, it charts changing student attitudes to class, race, gender, sex and sexuality across two centuries. As other scholars have noted, writing the history of the student experience without becoming celebratory or nostalgic, is challenging, but we hope we have risen to this in Student London. Students have formed a significant part of London’s population across 200 years and their experiences merit closer research.
The book is available free to download via Student London | UCL Press or can be bought as a hard copy for the special price of £20 here.