King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public research university in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's became one of the two founding colleges of the University of London. It is one of the oldest university-level institutions in England.
King's grew in the late 20th century through a series of mergers and reincorporations, including the reincorporation of its medical and dental school in 1983, mergers with Queen Elizabeth College and Chelsea College of Science and Technology in 1985 and the Institute of Psychiatry in 1997, and the merger of the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals in 1998. Plans for a merger with Cranfield University were announced in May 2026.
King's operates across five main campuses: the historic Strand Campus in central London, three other Thames-side campuses (Guy's, St Thomas' and Waterloo) nearby, and a campus in Denmark Hill in south London. It also has a presence in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, for professional military education, and in Newquay, Cornwall, which is where King's information service center is based. The academic activities are organized into nine faculties, which are subdivided into numerous departments, centers, and research divisions. In 2024/25, King's reported total income of £1.377 billion, of which £260.5 million was from research grants and contracts. It has the fourth largest endowment of any university in the UK, and the largest of any in London. King's is the sixth-largest university in the UK by total enrolment and receives over 68,000 undergraduate applications per year.
King's is a member of a range of academic organizations including the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the European University Association, and the Russell Group. King's is home to the Medical Research Council's MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders and is a founding member of the King's Health Partners academic health sciences centre, Francis Crick Institute and MedCity. By total enrolment, it is the largest European centre for graduate and post-graduate medical teaching and biomedical research, including the world's first nursing school, the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery. King's is generally regarded as part of the "golden triangle" of universities located in and about Oxford, Cambridge and London. King's has typically enjoyed royal patronage by virtue of its foundation; King Charles III reaffirmed patronage in May 2024.
Alumni and staff of King's or institutions that later merged with King's include 14 Nobel Prize laureates; heads of states, governments and intergovernmental organisations; 21 current members of the House of Commons, two Speakers of the House of Commons and 12 current members of the House of Lords; and the recipients of three Oscars.
History
Foundation
King's College, so named in recognition of the patronage of King George IV, was founded in 1829 (though the roots of King's medical school, St. Thomas, date back to the 16th century with recorded first teaching in 1561) in response to the theological controversy surrounding the founding of "London University" (which later became University College, London) in 1826.Cockburn, King, McDonnell (1969), pp. 345–359 London University was founded, with the backing of Utilitarians, Jews and Nonconformists, as a secular institution, intended to educate "the youth of our middling rich people between the ages of 15 or 16 and 20 or later"Hearnshaw (1929), p. 38 giving its nickname, "the godless college in Gower Street".Hibbert, Weinreb, Keay, Keay (2008), p. 958 The need for such an institution was a result of the religious and social nature of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which then educated solely the sons of wealthy Anglicans. The secular nature of London University gained disapproval, indeed, "the storms of opposition which raged around it threatened to crush every spark of vital energy which remained".MacIlwraith (1884), p. 32
The creation of King's College as a rival institution represented a Tory response to reaffirm the educational values of the established order.Thompson (1990), p. 5 More widely, King's was one of the first of a series of institutions which came about in the early nineteenth century as a result of the Industrial Revolution and great social changes in England following the Napoleonic Wars. By virtue of its foundation, King's enjoys the patronage of the monarch, had the Archbishop of Canterbury as its visitor, and during the nineteenth century counted among its official governors the Lord Chancellor, Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Mayor of London.
Duel in Battersea Fields, 21 March 1829
The simultaneous support of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (who was also Prime Minister of the United Kingdom then), for an Anglican King's College London and the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which was to lead to the granting of almost full civil rights to Catholics, was challenged by George Finch-Hatton, 10th Earl of Winchilsea, in early 1829. Winchilsea and his supporters wished for King's to be subject to the Test Acts, like the universities of Oxford, where only members of the Church of England could matriculate, and Cambridge, where non-Anglicans could matriculate but not graduate, "Londoners who did study, for example in Oxford or Cambridge, had to be quite rich and also members of the Anglican Church." but this was not Wellington's intent.
Winchilsea and about 150 other contributors withdrew their support of King's College London in response to Wellington's support of Catholic emancipation. In a letter to Wellington, he accused the Duke to have in mind "insidious designs for the infringement of our liberty and the introduction of Popery into every department of the State".Holmes (2002), p. 275 The letter provoked a furious exchange of correspondence and Wellington accused Winchilsea of imputing him with "disgraceful and criminal motives" in setting up King's College London. When Winchilsea refused to retract the remarks, Wellington – by his own admission, "no advocate of duelling" and a virgin duellist – demanded satisfaction in a contest of arms: "I now call upon your lordship to give me that satisfaction for your conduct which a gentleman has a right to require, and which a gentleman never refuses to give."
The result was a duel in Battersea Fields on 21 March 1829. Winchilsea did not fire his pistol, a plan he and his second almost certainly decided upon before the duel; Wellington took aim and fired wide to the right. Accounts differ as to whether Wellington missed on purpose. Wellington, noted for his poor aim, claimed he did, other reports more sympathetic to Winchilsea claimed he had aimed to kill. Honour was saved and Winchilsea wrote Wellington an apology. Every year, "Duel Day" is commemorated on the first Thursday following March 21, featuring a range of events across King's, including reenactments.
19th century
King's opened in October 1831 with the cleric William Otter appointed as first principal and lecturer in divinity. The Archbishop of Canterbury presided over the opening ceremony, in which a sermon was given in the chapel by Charles James Blomfield, the Bishop of London, on the subject of combining religious instruction with intellectual culture. Despite the attempts to make King's Anglican-only, the initial prospectus permitted, "nonconformists of all sorts to enter the college freely".Hearnshaw (1929), p. 80 William Howley: the governors and the professors, except the linguists, were required to be members of the Church of England but the students did not,Hibbert, Weinreb, Keay, Keay (2008), p. 462 though attendance at chapel was compulsory.Prospectus of King's College, London: academical year 1854–55, p. 7
King's was divided into a senior department and a junior department, also known as King's College School, which was originally situated in the basement of the Strand Campus. The junior department started with 85 pupils and only three teachers, but quickly grew to 500 by 1841, outgrowing its facilities and leading it to relocate to Wimbledon in 1897 where it remains, though it is no longer associated with King's College London. Within the senior department teaching was divided into three courses: a general course comprised divinity, classical languages, mathematics, English literature and history; a medical course; and miscellaneous subjects, such as law, political economy and modern languages, which were not related to any systematic course of study at the time and depended for their continuance on the supply of occasional students. In 1833 the general course was reorganised leading to the award of the Associate of King's College (AKC), the first qualification issued by King's. The course, which concerns questions of ethics and theology, is still awarded to students and staff who take an optional three-year course alongside their studies.
The river frontage was completed in April 1835 at a cost of £7,100,Thompson (1986), p. 6 fulfilling a key stipulation required by King's College London securing the site from the Crown. Unlike those in the school, student numbers in the Senior department remained almost stationary during King's first five years of existence. During this time the medical school was blighted by inefficiency and the divided loyalties of the staff leading to a steady decline in attendance. One of the most important appointments was that of Charles Wheatstone as professor of Experimental Philosophy.
At the time, neither King's, "London University", nor the medical schools at the London hospitals had the authority to confer degrees. In 1835 the government announced that it would establish an examining board to grant degrees, with "London University" and King's both becoming affiliated colleges. This became the University of London in 1836, the former "London University" becoming University College, London (UCL). The first University of London degrees were awarded to King's College London students in 1839.
In 1840, King's opened its own hospital on Portugal Street near Lincoln's Inn Fields, an area composed of overcrowded rookeries characterised by poverty and disease. The governance of King's College Hospital was later transferred to the corporation of the hospital established by the King's College Hospital Act 1851. The hospital moved to new premises in Denmark Hill, Camberwell in 1913. The appointment in 1877 of Joseph Lister as professor of clinical surgery greatly benefited the medical school, and the introduction of Lister's antiseptic surgical methods gained the hospital an international reputation.
In 1845, King's established a Military Department to train officers for the Army and the British East India Company, and in 1846 a Theological Department to train Anglican priests. In 1855, King's pioneered evening classes in London; that King's granted students at the evening classes certificates of college attendance to enable them to sit University of London degree exams was cited as an example of the worthlessness of these certificates in the decision by the University of London to end the affiliated colleges system in 1858 and open their examinations to everybody.