Student Storyteller Sonia Khan explores how UCL’s radical founding principles continue to shape student life today.
In the early 19th century, attending university in England meant subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Admission came with a conformity of thought.
On 11 February 1826, the deed establishing "London University" was signed. It marked the formal beginning of what we now call UCL, and with it an idea that higher education could be open, secular, and unapologetically modern. UCL refused to tie admission to religious allegiance and chose openness over orthodoxy. It altered who could enter the university in England, and under what terms.
Two centuries later, the radical nature of that choice is easy to miss because its effects feel ordinary. UCL’s founding vision endures because students continue to test it, expand it and hold it accountable. We move between disciplines. We question our lecturers. We build societies around interests that would once have been excluded. We expect debate. We expect difference. That culture did not appear fully formed in 1826. It has been shaped and reshaped by generations of students and staff.
Studying in UCL’s Founding Vision Today
For me, studying in the BSc Global Humanitarian Studies programme at UCL, that founding decision is not distant history. My course encourages us to ask who is allowed to be protected, whose suffering becomes visible, and whose knowledge is taken seriously in moments of crisis. We study disaster risk in the context of climate change, global inequality, and political power. We look at how systems decide which lives are counted and which are treated as peripheral. The idea that a university should be open, and that knowledge should circulate beyond inherited hierarchies, relates closely to those questions.
That principle is often linked back to Jeremy Bentham’s influence on UCL’s founders, in that institutions should be organised around utility and public benefit rather than inherited privilege. In practice, this means questioning who an institution is for and who it leaves out. In humanitarian work, those questions shape debates around early warning systems, funding priorities, climate displacement, and governance. Studying here places those debates within a university that began by challenging a narrow definition of who deserved access to knowledge.
UCL’s history includes moments when research shifted how society understood itself. When Ruth Glass coined the term "gentrification" in 1964, she gave language to how London’s housing patterns were described and debated. When Charles Kuen Kao’s research on optical fibre was recognised decades later, it reshaped how information could travel across distance. The Crookes tube that enabled the United Kingdom’s first clinical X ray marked a point where laboratory experimentation altered clinical practice. These contributions extended beyond UCL and changed how systems functioned.
UCL200 in the Present
This year, the bicentenary makes the university’s history visible across campus. The exhibition Two Centuries Here unfolds across the Cloisters, the Octagon Gallery, the Japanese Garden and the Student Centre, running through to summer 2027. Organised around origins, impact, community and futures, it places early documents and artefacts alongside contemporary research along the central route through Bloomsbury. Last month, UCL Illuminated also marked the bicentenary using light, sound and animation to trace the university’s development since 1826. In the weeks that followed, it also marked the end of Quad construction drilling during lectures, a milestone quietly appreciated by students and professors alike.
Alongside the exhibition, Faces of UCL focuses on individuals who reshaped the university from within. Kathleen Lonsdale became UCL’s first female professor while refusing to compromise her pacifist beliefs. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson challenged the exclusion of women from professional medicine. Ladipo Solanke founded the West African Students’ Union in 1920s London, creating space for political organisation and intellectual exchange. Jamie Gardiner established UCL GaySoc in 1972, contributing to the visibility of LGBTQ+ students in British higher education. The bicentenary is not framed only through milestones, but through people.
The public art programme forms another part of the year. It includes a Legacy Commission, a Staff Commission and an Artists-in-Residence programme. Professor Dame Sonia Boyce has been commissioned to create a permanent artwork for the Bloomsbury campus, to be installed from 2027. Professor Kristen Kreider and Dr James O’Leary are incorporating salvaged stone from across the UCL estate into a new vestibule space in the redeveloped Cloisters. Artists in residence, including Lauren Godfrey at the Student Community and Abel Holsborough at UCL East, are working directly with students throughout the year.
A University Shaped by Students
At the same time, the UCL Students’ Union has centred student activity within the bicentenary programme. The UCL200 Summer Festival will transform the Quad in June into a week of music, debate, workshops and the Bicentenary Ball. The artsUCL Fringe Festival invites students, whether experienced performers or first-time participants, to stage theatre, comedy, dance, cabaret, drag or experimental work across campus. Applications are open, free, and supported on a rolling basis. A special print edition of Pi Media will also mark both UCL’s 200th anniversary and Pi’s 80th year in newspaper form. The International Festival and the Campus Run extend the celebrations beyond academic departments, bringing together students, staff and alumni in shared spaces.
Much of what UCL is known for began with students organising, questioning or building something that did not previously exist. The UCL Students’ Union, founded in 1893, has shaped university life for more than a century. The choices students make this yearthe societies formed, the campaigns launched, the research pursued, the performances staged at the Fringewill become part of the record that future students look back on.
What We Inherit at 200
For students who feel detached from the bicentennial, that detachment is understandable. Academic life is demanding. Yet the bicentenary year creates opportunities that are distinctly student-facing: exhibitions you can walk through between lectures, festivals you can perform in, publications you can write for, art you can help shape, conversations you can attend. It offers a chance to see the institution not only as a provider of degrees, but as a community that has been repeatedly redefined by its students.
Being part of a university with 200 years of history does not make me feel small. It makes me feel responsible. I sit in the Student Centre late at night revising for exams that feel immediate and all consuming. Most days, UCL feels practical: deadlines, readings, societies, meetings, applications. The bicentenary interrupts that routine just enough to widen the frame. It reminds me that this institution has been shaped repeatedly by students who arrived uncertain, ambitious, political, creative, lonely, and hopeful. UCL200, to me, means inheriting an institution that has already been changed many times and recognising that we are part of the next change.
Sonia Khan is a Global Humanitarian Studies student from Canada. Alongside her studies, she serves as the Publications and Volunteering Officer on the Disaster Risk Reduction and Humanitarianism Society Committee, and enjoys working with photography and digital media to tell grounded stories that connect research with people.
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