STUDENTS’ HOME

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28477, 6 January 1958, Page 2

STUDENTS’ HOME

Functions Of London House

To my mind, the most fascinating household in Britain at present is London House, Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, writes Ernst Chisholm Thomson. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have just visited this collegiate home of students from all parts of the Commonwealth, set in the hub of London’s University “quarter,” only a discus throw from London University itself, the British Museum, the great teaching hospitals and the Inns of Court.

Here you will meet men from Canada, the Union of South Africa, India, Australia, . New Zealand, and perhaps half-a-dozen remote corners of the Colonial Empire.

London House, now. complete was subscribed to by the people of the United Kingdom as a thank-offering for food gifts sent during and after World War II from the Commonwealth and the United States. Sister Home

Its younger sister, on the north side of the Square, is William Goodenough House, only recently completed as a residential collegiate building for women and married students from the Commonwealth. Here 108 women students have rooms, and 12 furnished flats have been built for married couples, with 10 more flats outside. Looking at this trim six-storey block today, I find it difficult to remember the site as it was when I last visited Mecklenburgh Square on an autumn evening seven years ago. The old stuccoed buildings, now vanished, had been heavily bombed. “In the moonlight,” I wrote at the time, “they assume a stark and silvery beauty like the skeleton of some primeval brontosaurus that had died * where it stood sooner than admit defeat.”