HIS015060 Archives

The World of UCL

From its foundation in 1826, UCL embraced a progressive and pioneering spirit. It was the first university in England to admit students regardless of religion, and made higher education affordable and accessible to a much broader section of society. It was also effectively the first university to welcome women on equal terms with men. From the outset, UCL showed a commitment to innovative ideas and new methods of teaching and research.

This book charts the history of UCL from 1826 through to the present day, highlighting its many contributions to society in Britain and around the world. It covers the expansion of the university through the growth in student numbers and institutional mergers. It documents shifts in governance throughout the years, and the changing social and economic context in which UCL operated, including challenging periods of reconstruction after two World Wars.

Today UCL is one of the powerhouses of research and teaching, and a truly global university. It is currently seventh in the QS World University Rankings. This completely revised and updated edition features a new chapter based on interviews with key individuals at UCL. It comes at a time of ambitious development for UCL with the establishment of an entirely new campus in East London, UCL East, and Provost Michael Arthur’s ‘UCL 2034’ strategy which aims to secure the university’s long-term future and commits UCL to delivering global impact.

Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain

Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways.

Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.

Fonthill Recovered

Fonthill, in Wiltshire, is traditionally associated with the writer and collector William Beckford who built his Gothic fantasy house called Fonthill Abbey at the end of the eighteenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for overarching ambition and folly, a sublime ruin. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story of one man’s excesses. Beckford’s Abbey is only one of several important houses to be built on the estate since the early sixteenth century, all of them eventually consumed by fire or deliberately demolished, and all of them oddly forgotten by historians. Little now remains: a tower, a stable block, a kitchen range, some dressed stone, an indentation in a field.

Fonthill Recovered draws on histories of art and architecture, politics and economics to explore the rich cultural history of this famous Wiltshire estate. The first half of the book traces the occupation of Fonthill from the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century. Some of the owners surpassed Beckford in terms of their wealth, their collections, their political power and even, in one case, their sexual misdemeanours. They include Charles I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the richest commoner in the nineteenth century. The second half of the book consists of essays on specific topics, filling out such crucial areas as the complex history of the designed landscape, the sources of the Beckfords’ wealth and their collections, and one essay that features the most recent appearance of the Abbey in a video game.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain.

The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

Alexander Williamson

Alexander Williamson was professor of chemistry at UCL (1849–87) and a leading scientist of his time. He taught and cared for visiting Japanese students, thereby assisting them with their goal of modernising Japan. This short, accessible biography explores his contribution to nineteenth-century science as well as his lasting impact on Japanese society.

In 1863 five students from the Chōshū clan, with a desperate desire to learn from the West, made their way to England. They were put in the care of Williamson and his wife. Their mission was to learn about cutting-edge Western technology, science, economics and politics. When they returned home they rapidly became leading figures in Japanese life at a particularly turbulent time, one of them serving as the country’s first prime minister. Subsequently many other Japanese students followed in their footsteps and studied at UCL.

The remarkable story of the part Williamson and UCL played in the modernisation of Japan is little known today. This biography will promote a deeper understanding of Williamson’s scientific innovations and his legacy for Anglo-Japanese relations. An Afterword briefly outlines the extraordinary careers of the pioneering students after they left Britain.