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. (more…)

Credit: Culture Creative / Adobe.

9 November 2023

By Alison Lamont and Alison Koslowski

This is the third in a series of blog posts celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) and launch of Social Research for our Times. Following Peter Moss’s reflection on the founding directions of TCRU under its first director, Jack Tizard, and Claire Cameron and Eva Lloyd’s post showing some current strands of its work, we look to the future. In particular, we examine some of the ongoing challenges facing TCRU as we continue to work on delivering research with the strategic aim of informing policy. New, but quickly familiar challenges emerge: the slippery question of ‘impact’ and how to get research findings into the right hands at the right time, as well as the age-old fight to secure funding, now in a ‘post-Brexit’ landscape. In the conclusion to Social Research for our Times we consider these in connection with the local challenge of sustaining our research identity and our research. We focus on a) how we communicate our research findings, and to whom; and b) how we strengthen links with existing and prospective partners, especially now with European partners.

This post explores two modes of working that are already in action among TCRU colleagues and are promising avenues for building the Unit’s policy relevance. (more…)