The University of London began as an exam board, not a place to study
For its first six decades the University of London taught nobody. It set exams and awarded degrees, eventually to anyone who passed, wherever they had studied. That odd start made it the first UK university to grant degrees to women, and today it is Britain's largest by student numbers.
The story starts with a religious barrier. Oxford and Cambridge restricted degrees to Anglicans, so in 1826 reformers opened a secular London University, now University College London, though the state withheld recognition. Its rival, the Anglican King's College, received a charter in 1829. When UCL's requests to award degrees stalled, the government compromised in 1836: UCL became a mere college, and a separate University of London was chartered to examine its students and those of King's. The charter lapsed when William IV died, so Queen Victoria reissued it on 5 December 1837, and the first degrees followed in 1839.
Early graduates received degrees without ceremony until they petitioned for one; about 250 graduated at Somerset House in 1849. A new charter in 1858 opened the exams to all comers, severing the thin link with colleges, and added science degrees, the first BSc going out in 1860. In 1878 a supplemental charter made London the first British university to admit women to degrees; four women earned BAs in 1880.
Critics mocked it as an administrative testing centre, and UCL and King's threatened to break away to form a teaching university. The University of London Act 1898 instead made it federal from 1900, absorbing schools such as the London School of Economics and Royal Holloway, while keeping external degrees for students elsewhere, the forerunner of today's distance programmes. The university's search for a home ended in Bloomsbury, where Charles Holden designed Senate House, then the second-largest building in London, reportedly after a taxi driver identified the university only as the place near the Royal School of Needlework.
Since the University of London Act 2018, its 17 members are no longer called colleges and may seek university status without leaving. It counts about 205,400 campus students and 48,000 distance learners, and its roughly 2 million alumni include 98 Nobel laureates.
Source: University of London
