London School of Economics
The School was founded in 1895 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, with George Bernard Shaw among its earliest backers, 'to study the social conditions of the people' — a polite Victorian formula for examining poverty, industry and power at close range. Its buildings stack up a narrow site off Aldwych: the most vertical campus in London, and the most argumentative.
Charles Booth's survey of London life — the maps that first painted the city's poverty street by street — began the archive the School still keeps. The Old Theatre has heard Kennedy, Mandela and Habermas; the Beaver, nature's engineer, is the mascot; and the faculty rolls of the last century read like an index of modern social science, from Hayek and Popper to Sen.
Field notes
- Eighteen or so Nobel Prizes in economics cluster around LSE names — faculty, alumni and fellows counted together.
- The British Library of Political and Economic Science, on site, is the world's largest social science library.
- The Beaver was chosen in 1922 — 'it does its work by night and is persistent and precise.'
Notable connections
In brief — from the field guide
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.
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