Queen Mary University of London
Became a university in: It’s complicated! (See below)
Student population: 26,690 (2022/23)
Location: The main campus site, with academic, social and accommodation is on the Mile End Road in east London.
Subject areas: Everything you’d expect at a large multi-faculty university, including Humanities & Social Sciences, Medicine & Dentistry, Science and Engineering, and Life Sciences.
Admissions: Undergraduate entry grades are high, with courses asking between BBB and A*AA. Interviews are required for Medicine and Dentistry, but are not usually required for other subjects.
📸 Snapshot
A large, highly prestigious, research-intensive university located in the working class east end of London? Surely that can’t be right? Well, it just might be!
I worked as an interim Head of Student Recruitment at Queen Mary, stayed on as a marketing consultant, and then returned later to bring them on board as the first university in the world to launch Unibuddy, the peer-to-peer chat platform.
What I experienced was a super-high quality, traditional university, which (rather like Leicester) has research and teaching that compares with the very best, but which has none of the elitism that is often associated with such universities.
Queen Mary really only became the large, multi-faculty university it is today through the merger of Queen Mary & Westfield College with Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry in 1995, and legally it has only been called a university since 2013. But make no mistake, this is not a ‘new’ university.
The medical college at London Hospital which now forms part of the medical school is the oldest in the country (dating back to 1785), Westfield College was the country’s first women’s residential college (opened in 1882), while the East London Technical College (which became Queen Mary College) began awarding University of London Degrees in the early 1900s.
The main site is located on the Mile End Road, and while no one is going to call the campus beautiful, it does offer fantastic facilities, a community feel, and a little peace and quiet within this busy part of London. Halls of residence can be found right on campus, giving first years the opportunity to go from bed to lecture in minutes, which is uncommon in London. And of course, given it is super-easy to get to from swathes of greater London, the university attracts a lot of students who live at home and commute while studying.
Don’t forget of course, that you have the incredible social life of East London all around, with Shoreditch and Hackney a stone’s throw away, and the bright lights of central London not much further.
In summary
Queen Mary could be for you if…
You are looking for high quality, traditional university subjects and teaching, but with a down-to-earth vibe.
You live in East London and want somewhere local and commutable OR
You are looking for a campus in London, with all that the capital city has to offer.
And if you like Queen Mary, you might also like…
City University London
University of Hull
King’s College London
University of Leicester
University of Liverpool
University of Newcastle
University of Nottingham
University of Sheffield
University College London
