London’s universities are deeply embedded in the city’s streets and its global city status. But it wasn’t always like this. Two hundred years ago, its lack of a university was keenly debated in London’s taverns and coffee houses, decried as an impairment of the capital’s global status and an impoverishment of its citizens.
University College London (UCL), initially established as a private venture, led the way in addressing this deficit from 1826 – it is now marking its bicentenary. King’s College London followed in 1831, and by 1836 the University of London was constituted as an examining and degree-awarding body.
The mere existence of these start-ups was a signal of changing times. While Scotland and Wales had their own universities, Oxford and Cambridge had stymied the establishment of new universities in England, threatening to prosecute any graduates who participated in them.
As Degrees of Innovation, a new report written by me and published by University of London, explores, these new universities were radical in their approach. At a time when Anglicanism and Englishness were seen as two faces of the same coin, neither UCL or King’s set religious tests for admission (though King’s was more closely allied with the Church of England).
The creation of a separate examining body enabled rapid and unintended expansion. By the 1850s more than 100 institutions across Britain and Ireland were affiliated to the University of London, and from 1858 its degrees were opened up to anyone who met entrance requirements.
University of London exams were taken and degrees awarded in centres across Britain and its empire. London’s universities were also relatively quick to open up to women: the first women’s colleges were established in 1850 and University of London awarded degrees to women from 1878 – 50 years before Oxbridge.
These new universities were lampooned in conservative publications such as John Bull magazine, which derided UCL as a “cockney college” that would teach dustmen to speak Latin and Greek. But a 1859 magazine article, possibly written by Charles Dickens, pushed back:
“The Oxford don may smile over his old port at an university that will extend her hand and offer a firm grip even to the young shoemaker who studies in his garret. He may feel a little scornful of a university that gives, to the poor as well as to the rich, to the man of few opportunities as to the man of many, at the cost of hard toil and years of self-denial, the name and rank of a scholar.”
Alongside London’s new universities, the 19th Century saw explosive growth in polytechnics and working men’s institutes. These sought to extend the benefits of adult education to all neighbourhoods and classes, and to bridge the widening skills gap between Britain and other industrialising economies.
By 1900, the new London County Council (LCC) had established a Technical Education Board, led by Quintin Hogg, founder of Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) and Sidney Webb, founder of the London School of Economics. The LCC took on responsibility for funding further and higher education, alongside City of London charities and guilds, while University of London awarded degrees across London.
By the 1930s, polytechnics could be found in every part of the capital, while two central clusters of universities had been established in South Kensington and Bloomsbury. In the latter, Senate House stood out – for many years the tallest secular building in London, its height only justified by the fact that its higher floors were not inhabited but occupied solely by books (and presumably librarians).
In moving into these areas, universities had been pioneers and catalysts for what we would now call “regeneration”, a tradition that continues today with UCL’s new campus in Stratford (pictured), Imperial’s in White City and King’s College’s in Canada Water.
Two centuries on from its first university establishment, London is seen as one of the best student cities in the world and has two of the top ten universities. Half a million people study in London every year and a further 100,000 study for London degrees from overseas. Young people from all social backgrounds have much higher rates of participation in higher education than in other parts of the UK, and London’s universities have an impressive record of enabling people from disadvantaged backgrounds to get good degrees and good jobs.
But universities and students in London face the same stresses as those across the country – fees that have been squeezed over the past decade, immigration policy changes meaning fewer foreign students and therefore less cross-subsidy, new technology threatening traditional models of teaching and learning, and questions being raised about the cost and value of degrees.
As the essays that accompany Degrees of Innovation suggest, London’s higher education history may offer inspiration for the future – offering more flexible courses, mixing in-person and online learning and allowing learning to become a lifelong process rather than a one-hit investment. London’s further and higher education institutions are a success story. With government help they can continue to support and showcase the capital and the nation as a whole.
Richard Brown 