Welcome to the Waterloo Campus Tour

B5 Auditorium is a lecture theatre that holds 400 people, making it one of our largest lecture theatres at King’s. There’s another lecture theatre across the road in Stamford Street, and there are a large number of different sized classrooms here.

Based in this building is the Drug Control Centre, which is a research centre in our Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine. There are just 35 accredited anti-doping laboratories in the world, and the King’s laboratory is the only one in the UK.

The King’s Drug Control Centre ran an independent anti-doping facility during the London 2012 Olympic Games. Thousands of samples were analysed, more than at any previous Olympics, to test for banned substances. Using the knowledge and skills they gained at London 2012, scientists from King’s spent time in Brazil helping set up the Brazilian Doping Control Laboratory ready for the Rio Olympics last summer.

The Waterloo Campus has three main buildings: Franklin-Wilkins Building, James Clerk Maxwell Building, and Stamford Street Apartments.

We’re in the Franklin-Wilkins Building, known as FWB, which is the main building at the Waterloo Campus. It was originally built as a royal Stationery Office, but during World War I it became the largest military hospital in the country. Wounded men were brought to Waterloo Station, and were moved here through secret tunnels connecting the station to this building. This was to keep the injured and disfigured soldiers out of sight of the public.

King’s acquired the building and it opened in 2000, making it one of London’s largest university buildings. It’s named after Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, who you will have heard about if you took a Strand or Guy’s tour.

Based at Waterloo are Nursing & Midwifery, Nutrition and Dietetics, Pharmacy, Chemistry, and Physics (Physics labs only).

You might have noticed that our Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care is named after Florence Nightingale, the prominent social reformer and statistician, and founder of modern nursing. She came to prominence during the Crimean War, when she tended to wounded soldiers and was known as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’.

Some of the changes Nightingale made include improving healthcare, advocating better hunger relief in India, and expanding the role of women in the workforce. Florence Nightingale founded the first school of nursing in the world at St Thomas’ Hospital, which went on to become our modern-day Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care.

There are two cafes at Waterloo Campus. Bytes Café sells drinks and sandwiches. Upstairs is Bytes Restaurant, which is a large cafeteria serving hot food at breakfast and lunch time.

We’re just ten minutes’ walk from the Strand Campus, so many students based at Waterloo will cross the bridge to Strand to use the facilities there, which include the Waterfront Bar, and a large Students’ Union space called The Lobby.

Bytes Restaurant has great food, and there’s lots of space so many students choose to work in here if they prefer a more informal environment to the library.

The restaurant is usually open at lunch time, and they serve a variety of foods from hot food, vegan and vegetarian options.

There are also microwaves within the restaurant where you can warm up food and the Student Union front desk is situated near the restaurant too. 

This is the Franklin-Wilkins library, and it offers you all the resources, help and support you need to succeed in your studies. It houses the books and resources relevant to the subjects taught here. Within King’s Libraries & Collections you have access to over a million books and ebooks, thousands of ejournals, hundreds of databases as well as archival materials. It is really simple to loan books from the library, you simply need to scan the barcode on the loan machine and it will email you the details of your loan and the date you need to return it by.

The library is equipped with friendly staff who are here to help you with a wide range of issues from subject or resource related queries or basic IT trouble-shooting. The library also offers a live chat service called ‘LibChat. You’ll notice the library is split into zones that indicate where different types of study are appropriate. These include silent, quiet and group study areas. Group study rooms can be booked via our online system and are perfect for studying with friend or group projects.

The library is open 24/7 for most of the year and we also have 4 other libraries at King’s, so no matter where you are in London, all King’s libraries are available for you to use.

Physics have their labs based here, and so Physics teaching takes place both here at FWB and also across the river at the Strand Campus.

These are our brand-new Physics labs, opening in 2019 and designed for second and third year undergraduate experiments. There is also a dark room at the back of the labs, which is dedicated to studying the behaviour of light.

Over on the King’s Strand Campus there is also a new suite of phototonics and nanofabrication lab, which is run by our Photonics & Nanotechnoloy Group.

The Franklin-Wilkins Building is also home to the Department of Chemistry.

These labs were refurbished in 2016 and are fully equipped with the latest, state-of-the-art technology and are fully integrated for all types of Chemistry. These labs are also used by our Pharmacy students too.

Next door is the instrument room, which is where all the analysis of your experiments will take place. Not only are these labs fully equipped and modern, but they also have one of the best views of London’s South Bank!

Across the road is Stamford Street Apartments. This is a self-catered residence that houses 550 first year undergraduates. There are five to nine students in each flat. Students here have their own single bedroom and en-suite shower room, and share a kitchen with their flatmates. Residents have free Wi-Fi, and access to a common room, TV lounge, laundry facilities, bike storage, and 24 hour security.

We’ve got a wide variety of halls, all of which are within zones 1 and 2, the most central parts of London. You may also like to live in Intercollegiate Halls, which are catered and located in Bloomsbury. We share them with other University of London students at institutions such as SOAS, LSE or UCL.

Within residences there are a team of wardens and residence life assistants, who live on site and provide on-call pastoral and welfare support.

You can find out much more about how to apply for accommodation on our Residences webpage.

After first year, most students move into shared houses with friends. The University of London Housing Services help by registering landlords who sign up to a Code of Good Practice, checking contracts and offering legal advice.

Just around the corner is our Waterloo Health & Fitness Centre. It was refurbished in 2014, features a spin studio and state-of-the art Pulse cardio and strength equipment. There are a wide range of classes in things like yoga, Zumba, kettlebells, and circuit training. The student rate starts at £190 for a year’s off-peak membership, much cheaper than any private gym within central London.

Our campus is in a really great location. Just a couple of minutes that way is the South Bank, which is a well-known arts and entertainment district of London. There are lots of theatres and restaurants nearby, as well as attractions like the London Eye.

We’re very well connected here, with Waterloo Station a few minutes’ walk, which has excellent train, tube and bus connections to the rest of London and beyond.

Thank you for joining the tour today, I hope you enjoyed your visit to King’s College London and you’ve got a feel for why all of the students studying here chose King’s.

If you want to learn more about our range of subjects, you can explore our collection of recorded introduction talks on our On-demand open day, on our website. We will also be running an Open Day on campus again in the summer, and you can find more details of this also on our Open Day website.

If you have any questions for the admissions team, we recommend contacting the King’s Advisors on newstudents@kcl.ac.uk. You can also connect with current students and members of staff directly via our UniBuddy chat service.

Finally, if you were looking for a tour of the accommodation sites, you can contact the King’s Residences team through their webpage to arrange a viewing.