In June this year, UCL launched the UCL Walking Tour, a free guided walking tour aimed at inviting members of the public onto campus to learn more about UCL as a university and research institution and embrace its place at the heart of the Bloomsbury community.

This month, host Cerys alongside Ariana Razavi, Molly Rashbash and Chanju Mwanza, delve deeper into three of the tours stops, the Wilkins Building, the Petrie Museum and the Student Centre and discuss the role that these places on campus have on the people who use them every day – students and staff.

While these buildings form key parts of UCL’s history, they are just a small part of the tour, only by taking the full tour can visitors learn about the noble laureates and the famous alumni that have studied or researched at UCL, the mysterious secret tunnels that run under the Cruciform building and the Japanese Garden which stands as a symbol of UCL’s diverse community and international links.

Act 1: The Wilkins Building

The Wilkins Building is the focal point of UCL’s Bloomsbury Campus. It was designed by William Wilkins, perhaps best known for designing the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. At the time it was built, London looked very different and the area resembled a swampy wasteland on the edge of London, with one newspaper calling it a ‘large space of mud and nastiness’.

The foundation stone was laid on 30 April 1827 by The Duke of Sussex, sixth son of George III. However, the remainder of the quad wasn’t fully completed until 1985 when it was opened by Her Majesty the Queen. It was on this visit that the driver of her car actually crashed into one of the bollards in front of the Portico.

Ariana explores the Henry Wilkins Building in greater depth and interviews students on their favourite areas in the main UCL library, which can be found in the building.

Act 2: The Petrie Museum

Flinders Petrie was a pioneering archaeologist whose impact is still felt today. He was the first Egyptology professor in the UK, a role that was established at UCL in 1892 due to a bequest by women’s rights campaigner, writer and Egyptologist Amelia Edwards. She also bequeathed her collection of around a thousand Egyptian objects and her library to UCL. She deliberately chose UCL as it was the first university in the UK to award degrees to women.

Petrie first travelled to Egypt in 1880 and he went on to excavate for forty years in Egypt and the Egyptian authorities allowed him to take his finds to England where many of them ultimately became part of the UCL collection. Petrie was much more scientific and methodical in his approach to archaeological digs compared to what had gone before, and introduced methods similar to those used today.

Act 3: The Student Centre

Opened in 2019 and built to be one of the greenest, the Student Centre is on of the most sustainable buildings in the UK. This was achieved by using highly durable materials, installing automatic windows that naturally ventilate the building, planting a green roof, and adding 250 square metres of electric solar panels.

The Student Centre features the auto-icon of UCL’s spiritual founder, Jeremy Bentham along with a rare piece for Turner Prize winning artist and UCL alum, Rachel Whiteread. The sculpture is a cast of a notice board in the Slade School of Art, and if you look carefully you can see the “ghosts” of messages pinned to the original board inside the resin. It is one of only two permanent public works by the artist in the UK.

In this Act, we speak to the Student Centre manager and the students who use the space every day.

This month, the team has stories from an anthropologist who believes in the power of immersive storytelling, a social researcher trying to improve the health opportunities of young people, and a PhD student whose research is bringing greater access to green spaces.

Act 1

Prof Dinah Lammiman

In Act 1, hear Taqwa Sadiq's converstation with Prof Dinah Lammiman.

Dinah Lammiman is Professor of Immersive Factual Storytelling in UCL Anthropology. She leads UCL’s MA course In Immersive Factual Storytelling. Previously ImFaS was a studio within the Ethnographic Documentary Film making MA. Since the studio was introduced in 2017, many of our alumni have gone on to senior positions in the VR and AR industry.

She is also co founder of immersive storytelling company PastPorte. PastPorte creates stunning and thought-provoking installations bringing to life historic stories for national and international attractions. Clients include Hampton Court Palace, the National Trust for Scotland, ss Great Britain.

From 2017 -2019 she was also part of the team at the BBC VR incubation project producing and distributing award-winning VR content, particularly noted for its compelling narratives and popular appeal. Dinah also led a widescale project to push VR out to over 170 public libraries around the UK, thereby introducing a large new audience to VR and its possibilities. Previously Dinah Lammiman had a long and successful career as a producer and reporter for BBC News and Current Affairs – majoring in parliamentary stories.

Act 2

Dr Alexandra Albert

In Act 2, Maria Bunyun speaks with Dr Alexandra Albert.

Dr Alexandra Albert is a social researcher based across the Thomas Coram Research Institute, in the Social Research Institute at University College London (UCL), and the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) research group in the Geography Department at UCL. She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow on the ActEarly UK Preventative Research Programme (UKPRP), supporting the Healthy Livelihoods, Healthy Learning and Co-production and Citizen Science themes, in the London site of the project, in Tower Hamlets. ActEarly seeks to improve the health and opportunities for families in Bradford, West Yorkshire and Tower Hamlets, East London.

Prior to ActEarly, she worked on the EU H2020 funded Coordination and Support Action: Doing It Together Science (DITOS), helping to organise and deliver citizen science activities across Europe. She completed her PhD in citizen social science in 2019, taking a critical investigatory approach to the practices and processes of citizen social science – namely how people can be mobilised to engage in conducting social research, and the challenges and opportunities of using the data generated to tackle social issues. Her research interests include citizen science, participatory inventive methods, public sociology, and inclusive development.

Act 3

Maryam Bandukda

In Act 3, hear Katie Davies' conversation with Maryam Bandukda.

Maryam’s PhD research explores agency and participation of blind and partially sighted people in open space leisure activities and the impact of orientation and mobility training on self-efficacy and participation in leisure activities. She is supervised by Prof. Catherine Holloway, Prof. Nadia Berthouse, and Dr. Aneesha Singh.

Maryam's background is in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Science. Prior to joining GDI Hub as a PhD student, Maryam has worked as a Business Analyst and Project Manager for over 10 years in the United Kingdom and Pakistan.

This month we’re looking at the invisible... the things you might not usually notice. Cerys and team are looking at city soundscapes, the Antarctica continent and the radio frequency spectrum. We’re looking at these three subjects through a new lens and discussing how we make the invisible, visible.

Hosts: Molly Rasbash, Maria Bunyun, Taqwa Sadiq (UCL Students)
Guests: Andrew Mitchell, Prof Ilan Kellman, Dr Matthew Ritchie (UCL Academics)

Act 1

Andrew Mitchell

In Act 1, hear Molly Rasbash's conversation with Andrew Mitchell.

Andrew Mitchell is a Research Fellow in urban soundscape modelling at University College London (UCL). His research interests include soundscape analysis and visualisation, machine learning, and human perception of complex sounds. Andrew has been awarded two PhD and one Post-doctoral Enrichment Awards from The Alan Turing Institute and spent a month in early 2022 as a visiting research fellow at Stockholm University. His ongoing projects include the Soundscape Indices (SSID) Horizon 2020 project, Soundscapy, Deep Learning Techniques for noise Annoyance detection (DeLTA), AI for Urban Soundscape Enhancement (AI USE), the Catalogue of Soundscape Interventions (CSI), and the Soundscape Attributes Translation Project (SATP).

Andrew is also the host of The Rest is Just Noise, a monthly podcast exploring the relationship between sound and our cities. Each episode, Andrew and his co-hosts and colleagues Dr Francesco Aletta and Dr Tin Oberman speak with researchers and experts from a wide range of backgrounds about their work in urban sounds and sound perception.

Act 2

Ilan Kelman

In Act 2, Maria Bunyun speaks with Prof Ilan Kelman about Antarticness.

Ilan Kelman is a Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, integrating climate change into both. Three main areas are: (i) disaster diplomacy and health diplomacy http://www.disasterdiplomacy.org ; (ii) island sustainability involving safe and healthy communities in isolated locations http://www.islandvulnerability.org ; and (iii) risk education for health and disasters http://www.riskred.org

You can find Ilan at http://www.ilankelman.org and Twitter/Instagram @ILANKELMAN

Antarticness can also be found on the UCL Press website.

Act 3

Dr Matthew Ritchie

In Act 3, hear Taqwa Sadiq's conversation with Dr Matthew Ritchie about Radio Frequencies.

Dr Matthew Ritchie received an MSci degree in physics from The University of Nottingham, in 2008. Following this, he completed an Eng.D degree at University College London (UCL), in association with Thales U.K., in 2013. He continued at UCL as a postdoctoral research associate focusing on machine learning applied to multi-static radar for micro-Doppler classification.

In 2017 Dr Ritchie took a Senior Radar Scientist position at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratories (Dstl) which also involved working as the Team Leader for the Radar Sensing group in the Cyber and Information Systems Division. During his time at Dstl he worked on a broad range of cutting-edge RF sensing challenges collaborating with both industry and academia.

As of 2018 he has now taken a lectureship role at UCL within the Radar Sensing group. Currently, he serves as the Chair of the IEEE Aerospace and System Society (AESS) for the United Kingdom & Ireland, is a Subject Editor-in-Chief for the IET Electronics Letters journal and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He was awarded the 2017 IET RSN best paper award as well as the Bob Hill Award at the 2015 IEEE International Radar Conference.