There are a lot of colleges and universities in London, and most of them are aimed at… well… students. Gresham College is the exception. It sets no exams, awards no degrees, and it doesn’t charge tuition fees. Instead, it provides free lectures, and it has done for over four hundred years.
(Picture by Niznoz.)
The college is named after its sixteenth-century founder, Sir Thomas Gresham. As son of the Lord Mayor, Gresham was in a perfect position to set up a new college and make sure it took its place as a forum for public lectures and discussion. Originally the lectures were given in the City, then in the nineteenth century they moved to Gresham Street, and finally in 1991 to Barnard’s Inn. The college continues to make its aim to “challenge those who live and work in the City of London to engage in intellectual debate on those subjects in which the City has a proper concern”, but you certainly don’t have to live or work in the City to get in.
The college has eight professors at a time, covering fields including divinity, geometry, physic (not physics) and rhetoric with sweet archaism. Lectures take a break during August, but the September schedule is already full of exciting stuff — a solar explosion in 1859, 4000 years of geometry — while October promises a look at Hogarth’s London (particularly useful if you missed the recent Tate Hogarth exhibition) along with the intriguing “Is the world flat?” (we at the London Stopover Blog were pretty sure it wasn’t flat, but it only takes a second to say “no” and the lecture goes for quite a bit longer than that, so maybe it’s not as simple a question as we’d assumed).
If you miss a lecture you were particularly interested in, there’s even a lecture archive that stores recordings or transcripts of many of the previous lectures, on subjects ranging from the physics of sport to mental health and the state of London in 1616.
Gresham College Public Lectures: Barnard’s Inn, Holborn. From September, 1 p.m. or 6 p.m. on various days. Free.
