Qualla: King's College London

King's College London: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 19Tarrestnom65, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 21 March 1829, the Duke of Wellington - prime minister, victor of Waterloo, and reluctant duellist - met a fellow peer in a field at Battersea with a pair of pistols. The other man was the Earl of Winchilsea, who had accused him in print of plotting to introduce Catholicism into every department of the British state. Winchilsea raised his pistol and held it across his arm without firing. Wellington took aim and shot to one side, missing on purpose. Honour was satisfied. An apology was written. And in the middle of all this, somewhere between the insult and the bullet, was an institution Wellington was trying to build: King's College London. The duel was about who would teach England's young men.

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Image: 19Tarrestnom65 | CC BY-SA 4.0

King's College London: Tory Answer, Whig Question

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Whigs and Utilitarians had founded London University - what is now University College London - on Gower Street in 1826 as a secular institution open to Jews, dissenters, and anyone whose Anglican credentials Oxford and Cambridge would have refused. Within months a coalition o...

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Image: Diliff | CC BY-SA 3.0

King's College London: The Strand Building

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KiloCharlieLima, CC BY-SA 4.0. King's took up residence in what is now its oldest building - a sober yellow-brick wing along the Thames frontage of Somerset House. The architect was Sir Robert Smirke, who had already designed the British Museum and would soon design the General Post Office. He completed the ri...

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Image: KiloCharlieLima | CC BY-SA 4.0

King's College London: Lister and the Hospital

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FormerBBC, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1840, with the medical school growing, King's opened its own hospital on Portugal Street near Lincoln's Inn Fields. Portugal Street ran through some of the worst slums in central London - rookeries of unpaved alleys and cholera epidemics. The hospital, then, served the patient...

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Image: FormerBBC | CC BY-SA 4.0

King's College London: Photograph 51

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, CC BY-SA 4.0. Of the dozens of researchers King's would later claim as Nobel-adjacent, the one whose work most quietly changed the world never received a Nobel. Rosalind Franklin came to King's in 1951 as a research associate in the biophysics unit and turned her X-ray crystallography skills o...

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Image: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology | CC BY-SA 4.0

King's College London: Strand to Aldwych

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fil Brit, CC BY-SA 4.0. King's today has roughly 33,000 students across five campuses in central London: the Strand, Waterloo, Guy's near London Bridge, St Thomas' opposite Parliament, and Denmark Hill in Southwark. The medical, dental, and nursing schools at Guy's and St Thomas' joined King's in 1998 i...

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Image: Fil Brit | CC BY-SA 4.0