The Queen's Tower: Last Survivor of the Imperial Institute
Why is it significant?
Stand on the lawn and look straight up. The Queen's Tower climbs nearly ninety metres in pale stone and red brick, crowned with a copper cupola, and it seems to rise out of nothing at all, surrounded by laboratories and lecture blocks. That is because it once had a body.
Key Facts
| Place | The Queen's Tower: Last Survivor of the Imperial Institute |
|---|---|
| Address | Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.49840, -0.17690 |
| Part of Walk | Albertopolis: Prince Albert's London of Museums, Music and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the lawn and look straight up. The Queen's Tower climbs nearly ninety metres in pale stone and red brick, crowned with a copper cupola, and it seems to rise out of nothing at all, surrounded by laboratories and lecture blocks. That is because it once had a body.
In 1887, for Victoria's Golden Jubilee, the foundation stone was laid for the Imperial Institute, a gigantic palace by Thomas Collcutt, opened in 1893 to display the raw materials, products and science of the British Empire. Its long facade stretched along what is now Imperial College Road, and this tower was its central belfry. Inside still hangs a peal of bells given by an Australian benefactor, and they are rung on royal birthdays and anniversaries.
The Institute never really worked. Visitors were fewer than hoped, money ran short, and parts of the building were let to the University of London. In the 1950s Imperial College, created in 1907 by merging the scientific colleges of South Kensington, needed room to grow, and the government decided the old palace had to go. There was an outcry, the poet John Betjeman among the loudest voices, and the compromise saved only the tower. Everything else came down.
The colleges that formed Imperial had already trained remarkable minds. In 1884 a former draper's apprentice called Herbert George Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, a few steps from here on Exhibition Road, and studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, the scientist nicknamed Darwin's Bulldog. A decade later he published The Time Machine, and you can feel Huxley's evolution ticking through every page.
Imperial's medical school now includes St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, where Alexander Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mould had killed the bacteria on one of his plates... the beginning of penicillin. Science in this quarter is not a museum piece; it is still being done in the buildings all around you. Walk back out to Exhibition Road and turn right. The long stone building ahead is a museum where you can stand beside a spacecraft that went to the Moon.