About King's Past

The King’s Past project explores the history of King’s College London and its national and global connections.

For more information about the team, see Team.

For more information about the rationale for the thirteen moments, see Rationale.

For more information about the Demonumenta project, see Demonumenta.

The ethos of King’s College London is knowledge with purpose. King’s aspires to be an inclusive civic institution, where the pursuit of learning is animated by a sense of relationships and responsibilities beyond the academy. But the history of King’s College London is complex.

From its foundation, life at King’s has been entwined with political, social and economic power in the UK and across the world, and that creates a sometimes challenging legacy. 10% of the initial money given to found King’s came from the labour of enslaved people; throughout the nineteenth century King’s helped sustain an empire based on racial and social hierarchies. But King’s has been at the centre of leading major scientific advances, has been at the forefront of inclusive education from women’s education in the 1880s to widening participation now, and has been a site of coordination of voices against empire and racism from across the world. Throughout its beginning King’s has been intertwined with structures which made the modern world, from empire to the nation state, science, medicine and engineering technology to modern political and bureaucratic. King’s history shares the complex of those modern institutions and structures.

King’s Past is based on the belief that our relationships and responsibilities now place a duty upon us to investigate and communicate the complexity of our past, in a way which allows us to go on to repair its implications in the present where we need to.

The project is a platform for that process of research and communication. It brings together research and researchers – from undergraduates to senior Professors – interested in excavating the history of King’s College London and its local, national and global connections. It then will then create spaces for conversations about the implications of that past for the future.

The project does not offer a single vision of King’s history. There is certainly not a single official moral narrative. Instead, it provides a resource to allow anyone interested to navigate their own way through King’s past. We hope an initial engagement inspires users of the web resource - staff, students, alumni - to become producers, and research King’s Past themselves.

The project aims are to:

• strengthen King’s sense of purpose, through research and shared reflection on the past;
• support all students and staff developing a sense the university is for them, through work on King’s connection from diverse places and backgrounds
• increase historical knowledge about our own institution, which – as scholars – we just think is an intrinsically good thing.
• research and communicate King’s Past in a scholarly, rigorous way, while facilitating conversation between multiple different present-day perspectives

King’s Past is a platform to research and present the multiple histories of King’s College London. A project about King’s developed by the King’s community, it represents the interests of the King’s students and staff who’ve got involved with it. If you think something’s missing, or would like to tell a different aspect of the King’s story please email the project.