Queen Mary University of London
The college grew from the People's Palace of 1887 — a technical school, library and winter gardens built for the East End on the Mile End Road, and memorialised in Walter Besant's utopian novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men. Teaching began before the buildings were finished; Queen Mary College took its name in 1915 and merged with Westfield College in 1989.
The campus remains the only Russell Group site with its teaching, residences and green in one continuous stretch east of the City — bounded by the Regent's Canal on one side and the Victorian Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, now a woodland reserve, on another. Its medical school carries the lineage of St Bartholomew's Hospital, founded 1123, and the London Hospital in Whitechapel.
Field notes
- The People's Palace survives — its Great Hall was rebuilt after fire and still hosts the college's occasions.
- Barts, the medical school's ancestor, was founded in 1123 — the oldest hospital in Britain still on its original site.
- The campus library faces the Regent's Canal; reading rooms look out over towpath bicycles.
Notable connections
In brief — from the field guide
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.
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