éric 🚲 🇪🇺 Mar 5

The UCL (University College London) portico all lit up to celebrate the 200th anniversary.

#UCL #UCL200 #Photography #London

SimonFeb 12
To celebrate its bicentenary, UCL have published 200 short profiles of current and past figures, including one I wrote on Frank Salkilld, the popular beadle who had a side hustle selling unsold items like oversized socks from student bazaars. He was due to retire in 1940 but chose to stay on, helping with evacuation and directing people to shelters during raids.  He was killed in 1941 at the end of his Air Raid Warden shift #London #history #museums #WW2 #UCL200 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/about/search-faces-ucl/beadles-ucl-frank-salkilld-protecting-staff-and-students-end
The beadles of UCL: Frank Salkilld, protecting staff and students to the end

Frank was a well-known figure at UCL – students and staff in need would always cry “See Frank” and he would be there.

About UCL
Show threadSellaTheChemistSep 9, 2025
To my absolute astonishment today, while handing over a few items from our archives to the #UCL200 team, I spotted this: a letter from John Thomas Way's mother telling Thomas Graham (Professor of Chemistry at UCL among other things who discovered colloids, effusion, hydrogen absorption by palladium and more) that her son would be turning up in his lab as a pupil on Monday!
What else is lurking in there. John T Way would establish the phenomenon of ion exchange. #watersoftening #ClassicKit
SellaTheChemistAug 11, 2025
So the great UCL Chemistry Green Wash is now under construction. After years of such ideas being rejected on grounds of cost and lack of impact on our carbon emissions it's all going ahead.
I'm sure it will look pretty when it's done, and I hope it looks pretty five years from now, when the excitement #UCL200 will have been forgotten. But I keep thinking about the opportunity cost. What intervention on our Estate might we have done with the money we will have spent. #greenwashing #betonbrut 1/2