Generation UCL is a research and engagement project that explores two centuries of student life in London.
Led by Professor Georgina Brewis and Dr Sam Blaxland in Ioe, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, the research is now nearing completion, and the book will be published in 2026 as part of UCL’s bicentennial celebrations and the wider UCL200 Programme.
With the book manuscript due in February 2025, this is the last chance to let the team know about potential alumni, stories and sources from your faculty or department. Are there living alumni we must speak to? Are you aware of student memoirs, letters or diaries? Does your department have records or objects?
The book tells the story of London’s first university through the eyes of its students since 1826. The third university in England after Oxford and Cambridge, University College London had an open-entry policy with a motto that promised: ’Let all come’. It was the first to admit students regardless of religion and its arrival made higher education affordable and accessible to a much broader section of society. These nineteenth-century students invented what it meant to be a university student in London and helped shape the modern city we know today.
While we make no claim to write a comprehensive history of all London students since 1826, we are also including histories of the formerly independent higher education institutions that later merged with UCL, including the School of Pharmacy (1842), the London School of Medicine for Women (1874), the Institute of Education (1902) and the School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies (1915).
The research combines archival research and oral history with the analysis of a diverse range of sources including objects and the historic campus. As part of the project we have collected alumni donations of scrapbooks, memoirs, photographs and clothing, which will all find a safe home in UCL Special Collections. As a lasting legacy of the project, we are creating UCL’s first oral history alumni archive and have so far interviewed nearly 90 former students ranging in age from 21 to 102!
How to submit input
Please contact Sam Blaxland or Georgina Brewis.
- University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT (0) 20 7679 2000
