King's College London

On June 21, 1828, the Duke of Wellington chaired the public meeting that launched King’s College London, which was founded within the tradition of the Church of England.⁠[1]

In 1829 the college was established by royal charter under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington, then Prime Minister.⁠[2][3]

Early in 1829 the Earl of Winchilsea publicly challenged the Duke of Wellington over his support for both the Anglican King’s College and the Roman Catholic Relief Act. The two fought a duel at Battersea Fields on March 21, 1829; shots were fired, but no one was hurt.⁠[1]

In 1831 the college’s first students entered the King’s Building.⁠[4]

When the University of London was established in 1836, King’s College London became one of its two founding colleges.⁠[1]

In 1839 the college’s Council, persuaded by the physician Robert Bentley Todd, leased a disused workhouse in Portugal Street near Lincoln’s Inn Fields and converted it into a hospital so that King’s medical students could receive instruction close to the college. The first King’s College Hospital opened in 1840, and a second hospital opened on the enlarged site in 1861.⁠[5]

The university’s Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care descends directly from the world’s first professional school of nursing, founded by Florence Nightingale in 1860.⁠[1]

In 1878, with the support of the classics professor G. C. W. Warr and the principal Alfred Barry, lectures for women began in the old town hall in Kensington. An Act of Parliament granting the necessary statutory powers for a women’s department received royal assent in 1882, and in 1885 the Ladies’ Department opened at 13 Kensington Square, run by an executive committee under the college’s Council.⁠[6]

From 1894 to 1907 Lilian Faithfull, as vice-principal, developed the department into a university college. In 1898 the Council admitted women to the King’s College associateship, and in 1902 the Ladies’ Department became the Women’s Department, whose students sat University of London degree examinations.⁠[6]

In 1904 an Act of Parliament authorised King’s College Hospital to move south of the Thames to Denmark Hill, on land given to the hospital’s governors by William Frederick Danvers Smith (later Lord Hambleden). In 1909 the college was incorporated into the University of London; the hospital became a separate legal entity, and its Committee of Management took over advanced medical teaching as King’s College Hospital Medical School, while pre-clinical training stayed at the college. The new hospital at Denmark Hill opened in 1913.⁠[5]

Under the King’s College London Transfer Act of 1908, the Women’s Department was incorporated into the University of London as King’s College for Women in 1910. In 1914 it was agreed that King’s College would become coeducational by absorbing King’s College for Women, and in January 1915 the women’s college’s arts and science departments moved from Kensington Square to the Strand.⁠[6]

In 1923 a dental school and hospital was established within King’s College Hospital. In 1983 King’s College Hospital Medical School reunited with the college to form King’s College School of Medicine and Dentistry.⁠[5]

In May 1952 Rosalind Franklin and the PhD student Ray Gosling captured an image of the B form of DNA. Jim Watson saw it early in 1953, and it gave him and Francis Crick vital information for building their DNA model that March. On April 25, 1953, Nature published Watson and Crick’s discovery alongside a paper by Franklin and Gosling and one by Maurice Wilkins and colleagues from King’s.⁠[7]

Maurice Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and remained at King’s for the rest of his career.⁠[8]

The college merged with Chelsea College and Queen Elizabeth College in 1985, with the Institute of Psychiatry in 1997, and with the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals in 1998.⁠[1]

The 1998 merger created the Guy’s, King’s and St Thomas’s School of Medicine.⁠[5]

Since 1994 the college has had financial and academic autonomy while remaining part of the University of London.⁠[1]

In 1998 King’s College London joined the Russell Group together with Cardiff UniversityCardiff UniversityCardiff University is a research university in Cardiff, Wales. It opened in 1883 as the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire and is a member of the Russell Group.Open the full entry.⁠[9]

Since 2008 the college has awarded its own degrees.⁠[1]

In March 2015 the college announced that it would use Bush House, the former headquarters of the BBCBBCThe BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is the United Kingdom’s public broadcaster. Its predecessor was the British Broadcasting Company, formed in 1922, and since 1927 it has been established under a Royal Charter. It provides television, radio, and online services in the UK, is funded mainly by the television licence fee, and broadcasts worldwide in multiple languages through BBC World Service.Open the full entry World Service, on a 50-year lease, with Bush House and Strand House to be occupied in phases from September 2016.⁠[10]

On October 27, 2020, the college announced the appointment of Shitij Kapur as its next President & Principal, succeeding Sir Edward Byrne, who was to step down at the end of January 2021 and whom the college credited with the King’s Vision for 2029 and the acquisition of Bush House. The college also announced that Evelyn Welch would serve as interim President & Principal from February 2021.⁠[11]

Shitij Kapur took up the post on June 1, 2021. He graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1988 and earned a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Toronto. He worked at King’s from 2007 to 2016, including as founding Executive Dean of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, and then spent more than four years as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne.⁠[12][13]

On May 18, 2023, King Charles III granted the university its current Charter, and the Privy Council approved its Statutes the same day. The Charter sets out the university’s objects, functions and powers.⁠[2]

Lord Simon Stevens became Chair of King’s College Council on January 1, 2025. He was chief executive of NHS England for seven years and earlier served as a senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street; he sits as an independent crossbench member of the House of Lords and chairs Cancer Research UK.⁠[14][15]

On May 12, 2025, the university announced a £35 million donation from Inkfish, a philanthropic research organisation, which it described as the largest by a single donor in its history. The gift funds EMBRACE (Enhanced Maternal and Baby Results with AI-supported Care and Empowerment), a programme of personalised human and AI support from pregnancy to a child’s second birthday that plans a digital cohort of 60,000 pregnant women, partners and babies, with partners in the UK, Spain, Peru, Ghana, China and Canada.⁠[16]

On June 26, 2025, the university announced that Shitij Kapur had been reappointed for a second five-year term, with the title Vice-Chancellor & President.⁠[17]

The university’s 2024–25 financial statements said that its new university strategy would be launched in January 2026. The strategy, King’s StrategyStrategyStrategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is a Nasdaq-listed company (ticker MSTR) headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia, United States, founded in 1989 by Michael Saylor and originally built on enterprise analytics software. Since 2020, the company has used bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset and describes itself as the world’s first and largest Bitcoin Treasury Company; as of September 27, 2026, it held 847,666 bitcoins. Its current Chief Executive Officer is Phong Le.Open the full entry 2030, is framed as “In service of society through academic excellence” and sets four priorities: student success, investment in research and education excellence, innovation and entrepreneurship, and sustainable finances.⁠[18][19]

In the 2024–25 financial year ending July 31, 2025, total income was £1,376.6 million (up from £1,269.7 million the year before), including £711.7 million from tuition fees and education contracts and £260.5 million from research grants and contracts; the surplus for the year was £57.4 million. Full-time-equivalent student numbers were 35,148 and staff numbers 9,716.⁠[18]

As of November 2026 the university’s website listed more than 42,000 students and more than 300,000 alumni, and ranked it 31st in the QS World University Rankings 2026 and 36th in the Times Higher EducationTimes Higher EducationTimes Higher Education (THE) is a London-based higher education news and data company. It grew out of the Times Higher Education Supplement, launched in 1971, and is best known for its World University Rankings, founded in 2004; it has been owned by the private equity firm Inflexion since 2019.Open the full entry World University Rankings 2025.⁠[20]

The university has nine faculties: Arts & Humanities; Law; Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care; Business; Life Sciences & Medicine; Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience; Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences; Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences; and Social Sciences & Public Policy.⁠[20]

It has five campuses in London: four along the Thames in central London and one at Denmark Hill.⁠[20][1]

The university lists 14 Nobel laureates connected with King’s and its associated institutions, among them Charles Barkla (Physics, 1917; professor of physics, 1909–1913), Owen Willans Richardson (Physics, 1928; Wheatstone Professor of Physics, 1914–1924), Edward Appleton (Physics, 1947; Wheatstone Professor of Physics, 1924–1936), James Black (Physiology or Medicine, 1988; professor of analytical pharmacology), Mario Vargas Llosa (Literature, 2010; lecturer, 1969–1970) and Roger PenroseRoger PenroseRoger Penrose is a British mathematician and mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, known for his singularity theorem on gravitational collapse, twistor theory and Penrose tiling; in 2020 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that black hole formation is a robust prediction of general relativity.Open the full entry (Physics, 2020; research associate, 1961–1963).⁠[8][1]

Notable alumni named by the university include the athlete Dina Asher-Smith and the author Sir Michael Morpurgo.⁠[1]

The university’s motto is the Latin “Sancte et sapienter,” which it renders in English as “Holiness and wisdom.”⁠[4]

King’s College London: Official website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/kingscollegelon (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/7198 (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/kingscollegelondon (opens in a new window).⁠[21]