University of London

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of London was established by royal charter on the 28th of November 1836, not as a place of teaching, but as an examining board. It could award degrees; it could not deliver a single lecture. That peculiar arrangement set the tone for nearly two centuries of reinvention, expansion, and argument about what a university is actually for.

  By 2015 its alumni numbered around 2 million people worldwide, among them at least 14 monarchs, more than 60 presidents or prime ministers, 98 Nobel laureates, and a clutch of Grammy and Oscar winners. Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Alexander Fleming, Alexander Graham Bell, and Mahatma Gandhi all passed through its orbit. So did Mick Jagger, Elton John, and the members of Coldplay.

  Yet for most of its life, the University of London has been invisible in plain sight. Its member colleges carry the public reputation. The federal institution behind them has been a bureaucratic structure, a credential-granting machine, a landlord, and a battlefield. How did an examining board become the largest university in the United Kingdom by student numbers? And why, just as it reached that scale, did its own constituent colleges begin voting to leave it?

• 2. An Examining Board Is Born

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  University College London was founded in 1826 under the name "London University" as a secular alternative to Oxford and Cambridge, both of which limited their degrees to members of the Church of England. The controversy over UCL's existence was sharp enough that King's College London was founded as an Anglican counterweight just three years later, in 1829.

  When UCL applied for a royal charter as a degree-awarding university in 1830, the government refused. A second application in 1834 fared no better. The pressure from London's medical schools grew intense, because degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and the new University of Durham were all closed to non-Anglicans. The solution the government settled on was deliberately indirect: UCL would be incorporated as a college, without degree-awarding powers, and a separate body would be created to examine students and grant degrees.

  That second body became the University of London. Its first charter was issued on the 28th of November 1836. The university began drawing up degree regulations in March 1837, but ran almost immediately into a constitutional problem: the charter had been granted "during our Royal will and pleasure", which meant it was annulled by the death of William IV in June of that year. Queen Victoria issued a replacement charter on the 5th of December 1837, and the university awarded its first degrees in 1839, all to students from UCL and King's College.

  From the beginning, the university's authority was strictly limited. It could examine and award degrees in arts, laws, and medicine. It had no power to grant degrees in theology, the senior faculty at the other three English universities. In arts and law, it could only examine students from UCL, King's, or any other institution that received a royal warrant; the government, in effect, controlled which colleges could participate.

• 3. Openness and Its Consequences

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  By 1858, the list of institutions whose students could enter University of London examinations had grown to include all other British universities and more than 30 schools and colleges outside London. In that year a new charter opened the examinations to everyone, regardless of where they had studied. The Earl of Kimberley, a member of the university's senate, told the House of Lords in 1888 that there were no colleges affiliated to the University of London, "though there were some many years ago."

  The 1858 reforms also brought two significant expansions. Graduates were organized into a convocation, modelled on those of Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham. And for the first time the university was authorized to grant degrees in science; the first Bachelor of Science was awarded in 1860.

  The expanded role demanded more physical space. Between 1867 and 1870 a new headquarters was built at 6 Burlington Gardens, providing exam halls and offices. In 1863, a fourth charter gave the university the right to grant degrees in surgery; it is under this 1863 charter that the university remains incorporated today.

  The most consequential reform of the 19th century came in 1878, when the university became the first in the United Kingdom to admit women to degrees, under a supplemental charter. Four female students obtained Bachelor of Arts degrees in 1880. Two others obtained Bachelor of Science degrees in 1881. Both firsts were firsts for the country as well.

• 4. Going Federal

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  By the late 19th century the criticism of the University of London had hardened into a coherent complaint: it was a centre for the administration of tests, nothing more. UCL and King's College both considered leaving to form a new teaching university, variously proposed under the names Albert University, Gresham University, and Westminster University. Two royal commissions followed, and in 1898 a new act was passed that gave the university a federal structure, with responsibility for monitoring course content and academic standards within its colleges. The new statutes took effect in 1900.

  Under federation, many London colleges became schools of the university: UCL, King's College, Bedford College, Royal Holloway, and the London School of Economics joined in 1900. Goldsmiths College joined in 1904. Imperial College was founded in 1907. Queen Mary College joined in 1915. The School of Oriental and African Studies was founded in 1916. And Birkbeck College, which had been founded in 1823, joined in 1920.

  UCL and King's went a step further than the other colleges. Both actually merged into the university rather than simply affiliating. UCL's merger occurred in 1907 under the University College London (Transfer) Act 1905. King's College followed in 1910, under the King's College London (Transfer) Act 1908, though the college's theological department maintained a separate legal existence under King's College's original 1829 charter.

  The Burlington Gardens premises proved too small for the expanding institution almost immediately. In March 1900 the university moved to the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, but outgrew that too by the 1920s. A large parcel of land in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum, was acquired from the Duke of Bedford. The architect Charles Holden was appointed with the instruction to create a building "not to suggest a passing fashion inappropriate to buildings which will house an institution of so permanent a character as a University." Part of the motivation for that unusual brief was the story that William Beveridge, upon asking a London taxi driver to take him to the University of London, was met with the response "Oh, you mean the place near the Royal School of Needlework." Holden's response was Senate House, which at the time of completion was the second largest building in London.

• 5. War and Senate House

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  The University of London Officers' Training Corps was formed in 1908 and had enrolled 950 students by autumn 1914. Between August 1914 and March 1915, the OTC supplied 500 officers to the British Army. Some 665 officers associated with the university died during the First World War, and 245 in the Second.

  During the Second World War, the colleges of the university (with the exception of Birkbeck) evacuated their students to safer parts of the United Kingdom. Senate House itself was taken over by the Ministry of Information. Its roof became an observation point for the Royal Observer Corps. The building was struck by bombs several times but emerged largely intact; a rumour at the time held that the reason for its survival was that Adolf Hitler had intended to use it as his London headquarters.

  George Orwell's wife Eileen worked in Senate House for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information. Her experiences there informed the description of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The same wartime use of the building also inspired Graham Greene, who set his 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear in Bloomsbury; the 1944 Fritz Lang film adaptation followed.

• 6. Power Shifting to the Colleges

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  The latter decades of the 20th century were defined by a steady movement of power away from Senate House and toward the individual colleges. A new act defined the university as a federation of self-governing colleges, beginning a formal transfer of academic and financial authority. UCL was reincorporated as an independent legal entity in 1977. King's College received a new charter in 1980.

  In 1992, centralised graduation ceremonies at the Royal Albert Hall were replaced by individual ceremonies at the colleges. A more decisive shift came in 1993, when the Higher Education Funding Council for England switched from funding the University of London centrally to funding the colleges directly, with the colleges paying a contribution back to the university. The federal institution had become, in financial terms, a subordinate.

  The student union followed a similar trajectory. The ULU building on Malet Street had housed the University of London Union, the student union for all University of London students. It was briefly rebranded as "Student Central, London" from 2010 to 2022. In 2022, the building was acquired by Birkbeck and converted into an extension of its campus, leaving the university without a formal shared space for its federal student body.

  In October 2003, the university closed down the Convocation of all its alumni, acknowledging that individual college alumni associations had become the real centres of loyalty. The following year, in 2005, the Central School of Speech and Drama joined the federation, even as the direction of travel was pointing toward looser ties overall.

• 7. Departures and the 2018 Act

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  On the 9th of December 2005, Imperial College became the first major constituent body to formally decide to leave the University of London. Its council announced it was beginning negotiations to withdraw in time for the college's centenary celebrations, and to gain the right to award its own degrees. The University of London accepted Imperial's request on the 5th of October 2006. Imperial became fully independent on the 9th of July 2007.

  In February 2007, the Times Higher Education Supplement reported that the London School of Economics, University College London, and King's College London all planned to start awarding their own degrees rather than University of London degrees, beginning with the academic year starting in autumn 2007. The paper suggested this raised "new doubts about the future of the federal University of London."

  The response was legislative. Reforms proposed in 2016 allowed member institutions to seek university status without leaving the federation. A bill was introduced into the House of Lords in late 2016, but was held up in the House of Commons; MP Christopher Chope objected to it receiving a second reading without debate. The bill passed its second reading on the 16th of October 2018, received royal assent on the 20th of December 2018, and became the University of London Act 2018. Under the new act, member institutions ceased to be termed colleges and gained the right to seek university status while remaining part of the federal university. Notice was given in the London Gazette on the 4th of February 2019 that twelve of the colleges had applied for university status.

  In 2018, Heythrop College closed, becoming the first major British higher education institution to close since the medieval University of Northampton in 1265. Its library of more than 250,000 volumes was moved to Senate House Library.

• 8. Workers, Students, and Labour Disputes

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  Since 2010, the University of London has outsourced support services including cleaning and portering. That decision drove one of the most sustained labour campaigns in British higher education. The workers, predominantly from Latin America, organized under the "3Cosas" campaign, the three things being sick pay, holiday pay, and pensions on parity with directly employed staff. The 3Cosas campaigners were members of the UNISON trade union.

  Documents leaked in 2014 revealed that UNISON representatives had tried to counter the 3Cosas campaign in meetings with university management. The workers subsequently transferred to the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain.

  In December 2018, the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain called for a boycott of events at Senate House and other central university buildings, targeting what it described as a revenue stream worth around £40 million per year, with the aim of forcing the university to bring outsourced staff in-house. In May 2019, the congress of the University and College Union voted to support that boycott. Writing in The Guardian shortly before the vote, an academic named Dion Georgiou described the university management's response to worker demands as having "frequently blended short-termism with heavy-handedness."

  In May 2025, the incumbent Vice Chancellor, Professor Wendy Thomson, was suspended pending inquiries on allegations of bullying and poor leadership. Professor David Latchman assumed the position in an acting capacity from the 27th of May 2025. Thomson later resigned and launched legal action against the university for constructive dismissal and alleged detrimental treatment after making whistleblowing disclosures.