UCL Department of Geography

06/10/2026

UCL Geography is calling for 2026/2027 applications for The Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowships. The department's internal deadline for applications is Friday 2 November 2026 at 12pm. For more details: https://tinyurl.com/3e27xj3e

The Leverhulme Trust published their call for applications for the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship scheme.

02/10/2026

Welcome to all our undergraduates! We hope you have enjoyed your first week, including today's Sustainability induction and induction to the wonderful treasures of the UCL Map Library

23/09/2026

"You trust maps implicitly. We have to, right? Because we use them to navigate. But there's all sorts of choices and decisions that cartographers are making that gently steer us in one direction or another. And that's what makes them so powerful."

Check out the interview with UCL Social Data Institute's Director, James Cheshire, on BBC Radio Stoke below 👇

James is Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography in the UCL Department of Geography and Deputy Director at the Geographic Data Service (GeoDS).

🔗 Find out more about James and his work: https://tinyurl.com/yn43ksb6

UCL Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences

17/09/2026

"What we forget when looking at a map on a phone screen is how big physical maps are – you can lean over them, trace routes. They give you a god-like view on the world."

James Cheshire, SODA Director, Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography in UCL Department of Geography and Deputy Director of Geographic Data Service (GeoDS), discussing UCL's Map Library in The Spectator.

🔗 Read the full article: https://bit.ly/4izRJlk

UCL Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences

In the heart of Bloomsbury, deep in the bowels of the UCL geography department, down corridors floored in institutional linoleum, sticky and scuffed by generations of students, is a room full of maps. Hundreds of thousands stacked on top of each other, tidied away in sliding wooden drawers that marc...

10/09/2026

“When I teach my students cartography, I say to them, ‘What is it you’re trying to show?’ because, actually, if you’re trying to show things that relate to the population of the planet, Mercator’s not the way to go, because, actually, it expands the areas where no one lives, largely.”

James Cheshire on BBC Radio 4 discussing why the Mercator Projection has been the map of choice and why we need to think critically about the maps when we use them.

James is Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography (UCL Department of Geography), as well as Director of SODA and Deputy Director of GeoDS. Read more about James and his work: https://tinyurl.com/yn43ksb6

UCL Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences Geographic Data Service (GeoDS)

09/09/2026

We are delighted to celebrate and congratulate UCL Geography students who graduated yesterday! We are so proud of you and wish you all the best for the future.

09/09/2026

“Whilst universities will, in principle, support and welcome more EU students back into classrooms, the government will have to make up for any shortfalls in fee income. Universities will not be able to absorb this,” said Johanna Waters, a professor of Human Geography and co-director of the Migration Research Unit at UCL.

Any concessions made by new prime minister likely to be fiercely opposed by universities fearful of losing millions of pounds in income

08/09/2026

Congratulations to all of our undergraduates who graduated today!

What can we say? The world is truly at your feet. And we’d like to think that as graduates of UCL Geography, you now know something about that world!

We are proud of your journey and we wish you well as you embark on the next steps in life.

04/09/2026

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies has been awarded Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS). We’d like to congratulate Elena for this very well-deserved recognition of her outstanding contributions to the social sciences.

🔗 Read more: https://tinyurl.com/25pnvz3d

26/08/2026

What can happen when we give nature time to recover?

For farmer Derek Sayer, a difficult field in Norfolk was no longer worth cultivating. He stopped farming it in 2005.

His son, UCL Geography Professor Carl Sayer, saw an opportunity to study what might happen if nature was given the space to recover. Since 2011, the field has been cut for hay once a year, while the vegetation has been allowed to develop naturally.

The result is remarkable: more than 150 plant species have now been recorded, including orchids, yellow rattle and common centaury.

The story of this family meadow – and what it could tell us about approaches to habitat restoration – has been featured in The Guardian.

Carl is Professor of Limnology and Freshwater Ecology at UCL Geography and convenor of the MSc Aquatic Conservation, Ecology and Restoration.

Read the full story: tinyurl.com/ucl-med

UCL Social & Historical Sciences UCL Geographical Society

Farmer Derek Sayer let a boggy field run wild and just one annual hay-cut has led to remarkable biodiversity