The thirty-six
houses of London.

Founded on principles of secular, inclusive education — the first university established in London, and the first in England to admit students regardless of religion. Its Bloomsbury quadrangle conceals the Petrie Museum and the Grant Museum, both free.

A STEM-only institution seated in the Prince Consort's cultural quarter beside the Royal Albert Hall. The Queen's Tower is all that remains of the Imperial Institute; the labs quietly carried much of Britain's penicillin and radar history.

Chartered as the established church's answer to godless Gower Street. The Strand campus faces Somerset House across the world's most learned street; its medical schools descend from Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals.

Founded by Beatrice and Sidney Webb to study 'the social conditions of the poor.' Its campus is dense, vertical and unusually political — and its alumni and faculty hold a striking share of the world's economics Nobel Prizes.

Began as the People's Palace, a philanthropic venture in the East End. The only Russell Group university on a self-contained campus in central London's east — its grounds stretch between the Mile End Road and the Regent's Canal.

The School of Oriental and African Studies — founded to train the empire's administrators, now the West's leading centre for Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Its library holds over 1.5 million items in more than 400 languages.

Europe's largest university for art, design and fashion — six colleges, from Central Saint Martins at King's Cross to the London College of Fashion, with a Turner Prize record no institution matches.

The world's most influential art and design school — postgraduate only, from its Government School of Design origins in 1837, and regularly ranked first globally for art and design.

Founded by royal charter beside the Royal Albert Hall — its students rehearse a few steps from where they will debut. Holst, Vaughan Williams and Britten are the alumni triumvirate.

An art-school temperament grafted onto a former naval school in New Cross. The department that reshaped twentieth-century criticism sits beside the studio that launched the YBAs — and Blur formed in its halls of residence.

Patrick Manson's school for the medicine of hot places — founded 1899, when the empire's doctors kept dying of what they were sent to cure. Research-only, postgraduate, and arranged around one of Bloomsbury's landmark interwar buildings.

An unusual 2024 marriage: a Clerkenwell civic college known for journalism and business, united with a medical school whose lineage runs to 1733 and the teaching wards of St George's Hospital.