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Tom Webster grew up in London and lived there for twenty years in middle and later life, when he was Professor of Greek in the University at University College, the scene of much of his most fruitful work. For seventeen years before that, he was Hulme Professor of Greek at Manchester, taking up his appointment at the age of twenty-six, as the University recalled with pride and affection when it made him, in 1965, an honorary Doctor of Letters. He began his academic career with eight years (mainly) at Oxford, as an undergraduate and then a young don at Christ Church, with a fruitful interlude at Leipzig; he ended it with six years at Stanford, as Professor of Classics and then Emeritus. At and after the end of the First World War he was a schoolboy at Charterhouse; during the Second World War he served as an officer in Military Intelligence.

This chapter examines the progress of British study on the history of medieval science and medicine during the twentieth century. It explains that the history of science has been moderately well represented within the universities of the western world for rather more than a century, and has enjoyed a secure place in British universities for about half of that time. It describes major British publications on these subjects and discusses international precedents, the role of the University College London and the historical instruments and alchemy.

Robert Rees Davies (1938–2005), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a highly original historian who offered compelling new insights into medieval society through a body of work focused on Britain and Ireland and, above all, Wales. He deployed his formidable public skills as a chair of committees and eloquent promoter and advocate of the cause of history. To a considerable extent, Rees Davies' work as a historian was influenced by his higher education at University College London and the University of Oxford, as well as by the example of Marc Bloch and of other French historians. He was born at Glanddwynant, Caletwr, near Llandderfel in Merioneth, the fourth and youngest son of William Edward and Sarah Margaret Davies. The publication in 1987 of Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales 1063–1415, which won the Wolfson Literary Award for History, further enhanced Rees Davies' reputation as a scholar. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in the same year.

This chapter focuses on the years immediately following Chesterton' departure from St Paul's. In the summer of 1892, Chesterton spent a year preparing, in theory, for a course in fine arts and other subjects at University College London. The academic year 1892–3 was the year when Chesterton became a socialist; the next academic year, 1893–4, he began his studies at University College London, in whose buildings the Slade School of Art was housed. Though his formal artistic studies did little to turn him into a real artist, it was at the Slade that he came into contact with current trends in art — particularly as they embodied the principles and intellectual implications of Impressionism. The intellectual atmosphere of the Slade affected him profoundly, in a way which he was always to associate with the ‘morbid’ state of mind into which, intermittently, he fell most intensely during that year.

Brian Woledge (1904–2002), a Fellow of the British Academy and formerly Fielden Professor of French at University College London (UCL), devoted his professional life, with remarkable consistency of purpose, to understanding the Old French Language. As head of department at UCL, he would encourage students to take options in comparative philology and in phonetics. In the pursuit of such interests, Woledge's own commitment was absolute and unwavering and he rejoiced in sharing them. In 1930, thesis completed, the young scholar contemplated his future with greater equanimity, for he was armed with his first major publication, a study dedicated to Paul Barbier. In 1967, Woledge was for some months Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and three years later received an honorary doctorate from the University of Aix-en-Provence. After his retirement he was a Leverhulme Emeritus Research Fellow 1972–1973 and 1973–1974, and in 1989 was elected to Senior Fellowship of the Academy.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the lack of attention to the nature of evidence. It then describes the interdisciplinary research programme ‘Evidence, Inference and Enquiry: Towards an Integrated Science of Evidence’ (generally known simply as the ‘Evidence Programme’), established at University College London in 2004. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Following his death in 1832, Bentham’s body was dissected and then his skeleton used to create the ‘auto-icon’ or self-image which now resides at University College London. In his pamphlet ‘Auto-Icon; or, Of the Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’, Bentham explained how dead bodies might have their uses. This pamphlet, highly ironic in tone, was, in essence, a continuation of Bentham’s attack on the aristocracy, the law, and religion. The auto-icon was intended as an enduring monument to that attack.

This chapter presents recollections about Rees Davies. It covers his arrival at University College London in 1956, and his appointment as Assistant Lecturer in 1963, as well as the 19 years he spent in Aberystwyth before leaving 1995 in to take up the Chichele chair of medieval history in Oxford.

This chapter offers a perspective on the intellectual “character” of the place so often associated in cultural shorthand with Virginia Woolf and her circle, who lived in Gordon Square and other Bloomsbury squares from 1904. Though Victorian Bloomsbury demonstrates that significant educational innovation occurred specifically in Bloomsbury through the founding of a number of progressive institutions in the area during the nineteenth century, it is not possible to talk about a characteristically “Bloomsburyish” view of empire in that period. It is, however, possible to discuss some aspects of the topic in relation to the two most important cultural institutions located in Bloomsbury, University College London and the British Museum. The chapter also identifies one group based in Bloomsbury, which took a consistently anti-Empire stand from the 1850s onwards, and two anti-empire literary works, which are set in Bloomsbury.

The state of legal education in England had been a cause for public concern for some twenty years before the creation of the School of Law and Modern History at Oxford University in 1850. Such concern was greatly overdue. Until 1828 and 1829 when John Austin and Andrew Amos began lecturing at what was to become University College London, there had been for many years no effective public teaching of law anywhere. In 1833, the Incorporated Law Society was moved to begin the provision of courses for articled clerks. But there was little else. It was in these circumstances that in 1846 a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to inquire into the state of legal education in England and Ireland. It reported in the same year and the evidence which it heard made plain, among other things, the emptiness of even such legal education as Oxford ostensibly provided.

This chapter focuses on Tessa Verney Wheeler's life in University College London (UCL). While at college, Tessa specialized in the study of languages and English history. She was strongly influenced by Professor A. F. Pollard, a popular historian with a special interest in reforming the University of London's inadequate history faculty. In UCL, Tessa also became acquainted with Hilda Petrie and Margaret Murray who later became direct models of her professional life.

This chapter talks about Tessa Verney Wheeler's last years of education in University College London (UCL) and her marriage before the war. Tessa met Robert Eric Mortimer (Rik) Wheeler in UCL while they were both serving on the University College Literary Society Committee. They were married on May 21, 1914, the same year Tessa left the University College. By the time their first son was born, Rik was serving as a training officer in the Royal Field Artillery after the declaration of war in August 1914.

This chapter discusses the collaboration between France and the University College of London (UCL), which takes the shape of student exchange programmes, research projects, lectures and integrated teaching programs. It also discusses the research collaborations of UCL with French higher education institutions (HEIs) and research organisations, such as Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

In the spring of 1959, nine families moved from Baltimore to Boston, to the Department of Pharmacology. Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel were demoted to the status of “Associates”. From the beginning, teaching was a major new item for the group. With Sanford Palay's group in neuroanatomy, they taught medical students for six weeks each spring. It was one of their best teaching experiences, for it was apparent that the course was the most popular in school. In 1964, John Salk wanted to recruit David. David, however, made it clear that he did not want to break his collaboration with Torsten. David gave three “Special Lectures” at University College, University of London, in the last week of January 1965. In 1968, Torsten and David went together to Japan, to the International Physiological Congress in Tokyo.

In the 1930s, a community of influential British biologists seized on blood groups in their attempts to reform the study of human heredity. This community included R. A. Fisher, Lancelot Hogben, J. B. S. Haldane, Lionel Penrose, and Julia Bell, all of whom were recruited by the Medical Research Council to a new “Human Genetics Committee,” which would direct and support MRC-funded research on human inheritance. This was a period of heated disciplinary dispute and intense interest in eugenics and race; the committee believed that blood groups could help turn the study of human heredity into a modern, mathematically rigorous science. Blood groups, they believed, would provide a crucial reference point for pinning down the genetics of more complex traits, such as “mental defect” and “intelligence,” and might even lead to the first maps of human chromosomes. They believed blood groups also had the potential to reform race science. Soon, Fisher was awarded funding by the Rockefeller Foundation for a new lab devoted to blood group genetics: the Galton Serological Laboratory, based at University College, London. This chapter outlines how and why these scientists singled out blood groups in talking of modernity, race, and reform.

This chapter provides a context for the evolution of the concept of public engagement within the UK higher education sector focusing on a specific initiative: the Beacons for Public Engagement programme at University College London. Moreover, the chapter exposes the enabling conditions for communities and universities to work together; it recommends the five conditions to generate effective engagement, particularly through nuanced evaluation and support. In this case, evaluation and support can be seen as a pathway — bridging the gaps between theory and reality of engagement, between strategy and practice, and between the communities and academia — to ensure communities and universities to work together to create an impact on the university, research practice, communities, and ultimately, society.