Which London college did Francis Crick attend?

Francis Crick attended University College London, commonly abbreviated UCL.

Crick studied physics at UCL and earned a Bachelor of Science degree awarded by the University of London in 1937. His early training was therefore different from the biology-centered path many people associate with his later work on DNA.

Crick began doctoral research at UCL on the viscosity of water at high temperatures, but the outbreak of the Second World War interrupted that project. He then worked at the Admiralty Research Laboratory on magnetic and acoustic mines. After the war, he moved toward biology and eventually joined the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he began collaborating with James Watson.

King’s College London is an understandable distractor because Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins conducted important DNA-related work there. Imperial College London and Birkbeck College were also major London scientific institutions, but neither was Crick’s undergraduate college. UCL later became one of the partner institutions of the Francis Crick Institute.