Student London: A New History of Higher Education in the Capital

UCL students with their mascot Phineas in the 1930s. Credit: UCL Special Collections.

10 February 2026

By Georgina Brewis and Sam Blaxland

We are delighted to announce the publication of Student London: A New History of Higher Education in the Capital. Published to coincide with the 200^th anniversary of the founding of London’s first university, the book reflects our desire to write higher education students back into the story of London and to focus on students and students’ unions as a neglected aspect of university history. We started with the idea that we might see the students who arrived at the self-styled ‘London University’ in the late 1820s as its real ‘founders’. Student London quickly developed from being much more than a history of one institution however and makes no claim to be a new institutional history or to mark UCL’s milestones and research achievements, a task that is undertaken by the commemorative volume UCL at 200: Two Centuries of Insight and Impact.

The book 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. The project was a partnership between academic historians based at the UCL Institute of Education (IOE) and the UCL Students’ Union. After updating UCL’s official history The World of UCL in 2018, Georgina conceived of a new way to tell this story through the eyes of students since the 1820s. Sam joined the team in 2022 from Swansea University fresh from writing a new post-war history of that institution. Although funded by UCL, we were given a completely free hand to approach the research and writing of the book. We were particularly concerned to integrate the histories of previously independent institutions into the story of UCL. This was partly informed by our position as academics within one of these, the IOE, with its long tradition as the leading centre for historical research in education.

The London University as it looked on completion in 1829. Credit: Charles Walter Radclyffe, London University College, UCL Art Museum (3037).

Our book seeks to shed new light on the history of London through a focus on students and higher education. We take a holistic approach to the university experience. It goes well beyond a history of what and how students learned in the classroom, but our engagement with teaching and learning is reflected in the many images of field trips, libraries, laboratories and lecture halls that illustrate the book. We have researched student life not just at the original institution, founded in 1826 but known as University College London since 1836, but at the many formerly independent higher education institutions that later merged with UCL, including the Middlesex Hospital Medical School (itself formally established as a coordinated school of medicine in 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. 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.

Previous histories of higher education have tended to neglect students as a group, while scholars have dismissed the experiences of the first London students because they resembled neither the established undergraduate culture of nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge, nor the models they were familiar with in the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, 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 new eyes alongside a diverse range of student-produced publications going back 200 years. We have engaged with less usual sources including court records, secret service files, film, art and photography, and material culture. Memory sources including memoir, biography and oral history shaped the book. We have identified over 300 published and unpublished student memoirs, recorded new oral history interviews with 92 alumni and counting, and reanalysed over 30 existing interviews.

University College with the school playground next door in 1833. Credit: UCL Art Museum (4484).

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. General histories of London tend to neglect higher education, while explorations of London’s political cultures, housing, recreation, nightlife or diasporic communities have paid little attention to students and universities. Yet students have formed a significant part of London’s population across 200 years and their experiences merit closer research. It is worth noting that while we try to cover major themes in student life across the full 200 years, we leave the twenty-first century largely for future historians to document. Writing the history of our own times is difficult. It becomes increasingly challenging to see recent events in perspective or to make reasoned judgements. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, all the separate institutions we discuss in the book had merged into University College London, today the largest campus-based university in the UK by student numbers. Indeed, the expansion of the wider higher education sector across the capital in the early twenty-first century – at the time of writing there are more than 400,000 students in London across an enormous range of institutions – renders our claim to be able to reflect student London nearly impossible.

We end by asking what does the future of student life in London hold? Many challenges are set to remain. There is no sign that studying in the capital is going to stop being expensive, and many are already priced out of a London university education. Neither is the future of higher education likely to be stable. UK governments will continue to grapple with questions of funding a sector that is vital to society, culture and the economy, but where the numbers involved outstrip what governments in earlier periods have had to contend with. Likewise, political disagreements over immigration levels are impacting international student recruitment against a background of persistent media coverage in which students are never far from the headlines. For students, ever-larger institutions – where several hundred students in a lecture hall is not uncommon – may feel impersonal, isolating and overcrowded, meaning studying for a degree can feel transactional for some. Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the way students approach learning and assessments. This inevitably poses philosophical questions about the purpose of a university education and how students should engage with the acquisition of knowledge. If the last 200 years represent any sort of indicator of the future, however, then London will continue to be one of the most dynamic, exciting and challenging places in which to be a student.

The book is available open access on UCL Press or it can be bought as a hard copy.