Two student histories, side by side.

UCL

• 1826Founded. Opens to students in 1828 as the self-styled London University.
• 1828Admits nonconformists, Roman Catholics and Jews. Thomas Arnold calls it “that godless institution in Gower Street”.
• 1832The Wilkins Building is finished. The money ran out in 1829 with only the portico and dome standing.
• 1871The Slade School of Fine Art opens, teaching women on the same terms as men from its first day.
• 1878Women admitted to degrees.
• 1940The Blitz guts the library and brings down the dome.
• 1954The main building is fully restored, rebuilt to Wilkins’s original specification.

Loughborough

• 1909Founded as Loughborough Technical Institute, in the town centre.
• 1915Herbert Schofield becomes Principal. He holds the post for 35 years and serves as president of the Students’ Association while running the college.
• 1932Rutland Hall opens. The first students to live on campus.
• 1937Hazlerigg Hall opens beside it, around the Fountain Lawn.
• 1963Royce Hall opens, named after Sir Henry Royce of Rolls-Royce.
• 1966University status.

UCL

• 1893Council approves the Union Society on 3 June, for “the promotion of social intercourse and of the means of recreation, physical and mental”. Men only. The first of its kind in the country.
• 1897A Women’s Union Society is founded, because women were barred from the other one.
• 1940sThe union runs free healthcare for students, before the NHS exists.
• 1946The two unions merge in April, fifty-three years after the date on the plaques.
• 1948Margaret Richards is appointed Permanent Secretary and serves 23 years. Her definition: “partly representation, partly a social focus for the students, and partly a trade union for the students”.
• 1952Sheila Fitzgerald is elected President, the first woman to hold it and, as of the union’s own 2023 history, the only one.
• 1975The role of Union President is abolished outright, replaced by three sabbatical officers of equal status.
• 1979Occupation, over a campaign on sexual violence. Union publications advise hard-up students on squatting: “If you act collectively with others, you will usually be fairly secure”.
• 1986A Women’s Officer is created. The following year, a large occupation demands a bigger union building.
• 2014The Institute of Education merges in and UCL becomes majority postgraduate. The union then administered 230 clubs.
• 2000sDeficit budgets and falling engagement leave the union, in its own account, “relegated to the peripheries of student life”.
• 2018Sabbatical officers campaign for UCL to face its role in eugenics. That campaign produces the inquiry that reports in 2020.
• nowOver 400 groups. Every one must publish a constitution and admit any student, which is why UCL cannot have a secret society.

Loughborough

• 1975LSU takes its current form on 1 August, serving the university and two colleges.
• Six sections: welfare and diversity, societies, media, enterprise and employability, rag, action.
• The Athletic Union sits alongside them, representing over 60 student-led clubs.
• 2019The Executive settles at five officers, elected every February and March, scrutinised by a Union Affairs Committee, a Student Forum and a Board of Trustees.
• One officer, Student Communities, holds action, rag, societies and student voice together.
• Each hall elects its own committee: a chair, social reps, sport reps. Halls collect points in Intra-Mural Sport all year, weighted by each sport’s grading.

UCL

• 1828A Medical Society forms almost immediately. Medics dominated the first cohorts.
• 1829A Debating Society, founded as the Literary and Philosophical Society. Three years after the university itself.
• 1858A Reading Room Society, formed to give students a sense of community thirty-five years before there was a union.
• 1897The union buys a sports ground at Acton: eighteen grass courts, two cricket squares, a running track. The Boat Club still descends from it.
• 1900sMusic, Debate and Drama are funded centrally and free to join. Film Soc and, per the union’s history, the Jazz Society are added later.
• 1906The first student play: The Importance of Being Earnest.
• 1900sA Critical Society, founded “for the consideration of philosophical, social, and religious questions without any restrictions as to standpoint”.
• 1948Film Society founded. It owns a Steenbeck editing suite and 16mm cameras, which almost no university did.
• 1989Christopher Nolan picks UCL for that equipment. He meets Emma Thomas in his first week and brings her into the society.
• 1990sThey run 35mm screenings across the year and spend the takings on 16mm film in the summer. Larceny 1996, shot over a weekend on the society’s kit. Doodlebug 1997, scored by David Julyan, another member. Following 1998, on about $6,000.
• 1996Four students meet in Ramsay Hall and form the band that becomes Coldplay.
• nowThe Institute of Making is free to every student: laser cutters, 3D printers, woodwork, ceramics and a Materials Library.

Loughborough

• 1919Students of Loughborough College form the original rugby side in September.
• 1920A football club follows, founded as Loughborough College.
• 1930The Loughborough Colleges XV enters the Universities Athletic Union and beats Nottingham 8–0 in its first match. The club has since won the national championship twenty-seven times.
• The Motor Club is reportedly the oldest club on campus. Members get a workshop, a full tool set, a hydraulic press and a car trailer.
• Weekly garage sessions, all levels, from an oil change to an engine rebuild.
• Elsewhere on the list: hot air ballooning, a Computer Society, and a joint Scout and Guide club.
• 1963Royce Hall opens and builds its own calendar. St Fred, its patron saint, gets a day a year with inflatables, punch and a barbecue.
• 2010Peter Holmes, Royce’s rag rep, runs 100 laps of the hall for charity. He dies that year in an accident near Vancouver.
• nowRoyce runs those 100 laps every year in his memory. It is the hall’s largest rag event.
• Action, the volunteering section, puts over 800 students into local projects.

UCL

• 1830The London University Chronicle. It lasts a few editions.
• 1937Phineas, a union newspaper named after the mascot. Evacuated out of London during the war, as was the statue.
• 1946Pi, named after the Provost, Sir David Pye. It launches as deliberately non-political, in a college running everything from a Conservative Society to a Revolutionary Socialist Society.
• The standard of the Refectory is a permanent grievance across all of it.
• 2004The Cheese Grater, investigative and satirical, founded in February. Its 2018 investigation into UCL and race is cited in the union’s own official history.
• 2011The Graters, its sketch group, form and take a show to the Edinburgh Fringe every year since, apart from 2020.
• nowPi runs online, in print and as PiTV, eighty years on. When UCL commissioned a history of its own union, Pi was the source it was written from.

Loughborough

• 1970sLCR starts broadcasting. It is the oldest section of LSU Media.
• 1980sThe Alternative Alternative Show begins, and has run continuously since. The longest-running student radio show in the UK.
• 1997Label, the student magazine, out of a predecessor called The Newspaper.
• 2001LSUTV, expanded out of the Media Centre. Six awards at the student television awards in 2020, including best documentary.
• 2014Lens, the photography section, founded under its first head, Isabella Piggott.
• Four sections under one masthead: Label, LCR, Lens and LSUTV.

UCL

• 1900sRag runs as stunts, races and hijinks, usually pointed at King’s.
• 1927A rag magazine is published to mark UCL’s centenary.
• 1950sBonfires are lit in the Main Quad every year until this decade.
• 1960sStudents challenge the charity framing and ask for real community work instead.
• nowThe union’s own history re-evaluates rag for its “darker, sexist undertones”.

Loughborough

• 1920sA rag parade starts running through the town, and has ever since.
• by 1972The rag magazine is called Thor, after the mascot. Both universities named a student publication after a statue.
• 1979Records begin. Rag has raised over £18 million since.
• 1984A hitchhike to Paris.
• 2015£1,393,847.08 in one year, the sixth in a row above a million.
• 2019Named student fundraising group of the year.
• nowThe largest student fundraising organisation in Europe. Raids are bucket collections in other cities, usually with a night’s stay so collectors catch the morning rush hour.
• Bigger asks on the list: Kilimanjaro, a skydive, cycling the coast of Scotland. The committee includes Alumni Officers, whose job is the line back through previous years.

UCL

• 1832Jeremy Bentham dies on 6 June and leaves instructions. He is publicly dissected by Southwood Smith, then preserved, dressed in his own clothes and seated in a cabinet.
• 1850UCL takes the auto-icon. The head mummified badly, so a wax one sits on top of it.
• 1900Students steal a wooden Highlander from a shop on Tottenham Court Road during a parade for the relief of Ladysmith. He becomes Phineas.
• 1932The store gives Phineas to UCL. He becomes the official mascot, and later meets the King and Queen.
• 1975King’s students steal Bentham’s head and demand £100 for Shelter. UCL pays £10 and gets it back.
• 2002The real head goes into a climate-controlled store at the Institute of Archaeology.
• 2019The union votes to retire Phineas over the Boer War parade he came from.
• 2020The auto-icon moves to the Student Centre, where it still sits. The story that he is minuted “present but not voting” at council meetings is a myth, and UCL says so itself.

Loughborough

• 1958Students of Hazlerigg-Rutland weld Thor in the college welding shop: an oversized knight’s helmet with the visor down, copied from the helmet in the old college crest.
• 1980sThor is on display in the Students’ Union foyer.
• sinceMissing. The union has made a film about him. The university has said publicly that nobody is really sure where the real Thor is.

UCL

• 1947The first Union Bar opens in the South Junction. One barman, Charlie, whose stories amused “even water drinkers”. Beer and cigarettes, no spirits.
• 1947It is immediately judged “the most popular aspect of Union activities” and “the real common denominator of student life”.
• 1950sThe Garage, a hut on the bombsite where the Great Hall stood, hosts the Saturday night hop. One student called it “where you went to find a boyfriend”.
• 1959The union moves into 25 Gordon Street, a former hospital the Provost called “very far from adequate” before anyone moved in. It is still there.
• 1981Cocktails night launches. Queues run around the block, in a building licensed for 6.5% of the student body.

Loughborough

• 30+ yrsFND, the Friday night, has run for over thirty years in the union’s own building. Described as the biggest student club night in the UK.
• Hey Ewe runs on Wednesdays, to celebrate that day’s sporting results.

UCL

• The Hatchery, a two-year incubator at BaseKX in King’s Cross, for students and graduates within two years.
• Your company must already be registered at Companies House before you can apply.
• Eight weeks of induction to start: one workshop on a Thursday evening plus two online sessions, every week.

Loughborough

• LSU Enterprise is a section of the union itself. No company required to walk in.
• Then the Start-Up Lab, which bridges the union’s hub and The Studio, and then LUinc. out on the science park.
• The whole ladder is called the Loughborough Enterprise Network, and is meant to run from a student’s first idea to a first institutional round.
• The graduate start-up programme carries up to £7,500.