Imperial College London
Imperial was chartered in 1907 by federating three Victorian institutions — the Royal College of Science, the Royal School of Mines and the City & Guilds College — on land the 1851 Exhibition had set aside for science and art. It left the University of London in 2007, on its centenary, to award its own degrees. The college remains deliberately STEM-shaped: no faculties of letters, no departments of divinity.
Penicillin's story runs through its medical school at St Mary's, where Alexander Fleming first cultured the mould in 1928; radar's runs through its wartime physics rooms. The cultured plate — 'the mould' — is still shown to visitors at St Mary's. The campus sits between the V&A and the Royal College of Music, which may be the most civilised address in British science.
Field notes
- H.G. Wells studied biology here in the 1880s, under T.H. Huxley — 'Darwin's bulldog' himself.
- Brian May took thirty years to finish his Imperial PhD, between guitar solos; he submitted in 2007, on zodiacal dust.
- The Queen's Tower, all that survives of the Imperial Institute, stands 85 metres over a campus otherwise rebuilt for laboratories.
Notable connections
In brief — from the field guide
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.
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