UCL - Happy Birthday !
Two centuries is a long time for an idea to remain alive.
When University College London turns 200 this February, it marks more than an anniversary. It marks the endurance of a radical proposition: that knowledge should be open, plural, contested, and in service of society. Founded in 1826 as the first university in England to admit students regardless of religion, UCL was conceived not as an ivory tower but as a civic instrument. A place where science, philosophy, medicine, engineering, law, and culture could meet the real problems of the world. That founding impulse still matters. Perhaps more now than ever.
Over two centuries, UCL has grown into one of the world’s most influential research universities. It consistently ranks among the global top ten, with more than 50,000 students, over 13,000 staff, and a research portfolio that spans everything from neuroscience and AI to climate science, public health, architecture, urbanism, and global policy. It is home to more than 30 Nobel Prize laureates, whose work has shaped modern physics, medicine, chemistry, economics, and physiology. Discoveries linked to UCL include the structure of DNA, the development of MRI, foundational advances in epidemiology, and breakthroughs in neuroscience that continue to inform how we understand the human brain.
Yet statistics alone do not explain UCL’s significance.
What distinguishes UCL is its orientation toward the future. It has long understood that universities cannot exist in isolation from the societies they serve. Its partnerships with industry, government, NGOs, and global institutions reflect a model of research that is translational rather than abstract. UCL’s innovation ecosystem, including UCL Innovation & Enterprise, has supported hundreds of spinouts, start-ups, and social ventures, translating academic insight into real-world impact across health, cities, sustainability, and technology.
Nowhere is this more evident than within The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment.
The Bartlett is not simply a school of architecture or planning. It is a laboratory for reimagining how humans inhabit the planet. Bringing together architecture, urban design, energy, transport, real estate, development economics, and policy, it treats the built environment as a living system shaped by energy flows, materials, culture, power, and human behaviour. It asks questions that are as ethical as they are technical. How do cities consume resources? Who benefits from development? How do we design for resilience, equity, and planetary boundaries?
(It was within this context that I undertook my PhD).
Choosing UCL and The Bartlett remains one of the best decisions I have ever made.
My doctoral work sat at the intersection of energy systems, cities, and design. It required not only technical rigour but conceptual freedom. At UCL, I was given both. I was surrounded by professors and researchers who were not interested in narrow compliance but in intellectual honesty. Leaders in the built environment who were actively shaping policy, advising governments, influencing industry, and redefining what sustainable development could mean in practice.
The culture was demanding, but it was also generous. Ideas were challenged robustly, but always with the assumption that thinking deeply was an act of service. I learned how to hold complexity without reducing it. How to integrate data with lived experience. How to speak across disciplines rather than remain confined within one.
That education did not end with a thesis.
It shaped how I work in the world. How I engage with systems. How I understand leadership. The Bartlett, and UCL more broadly, instilled a sense that knowledge carries responsibility. That research is not neutral. That design decisions ripple outward across generations, ecosystems, and economies.
UCL’s influence extends far beyond Bloomsbury. Its alumni network spans science, politics, business, culture, medicine, and activism. Graduates have gone on to lead global companies, advise international institutions, shape cities, pioneer medical treatments, and challenge entrenched systems. There is a quiet confidence that comes from belonging to a university that has never been afraid to be early, to be controversial, or to be right before it was popular.
As UCL enters its third century, the questions it faces are profound. How should universities respond to climate breakdown, AI, geopolitical instability, public health crises, and widening inequality? How do we educate not just skilled professionals, but ethical stewards of the future?
If history is any guide, UCL will continue to lean into these questions rather than away from them.
For me, UCL was not simply a place of study. It was a crucible. A place where intellectual courage was normalised, where interdisciplinary thinking was expected, and where the future was treated as something we are actively responsible for designing.
Two hundred years on, that feels like a legacy worth celebrating.
Not because of prestige alone, but because the world still needs universities that dare to think differently, act collectively, and remain in service to humanity.
