University College London (UCL) has taken steps to address its historical links with eugenics and scientific racism in a moving new exhibition.
Words Matter, now on display at the university’s campus in Stratford, combines photography, film and spoken word to tackle UCL’s ties with Francis Galton, considered the founder of the field of study of eugenics, and his protégé, Karl Pearson.
UCL Community Engagement Manager Briony Fleming said: “Originally, the plan was to create a statue or something static, but you just simply cannot memorialise the history around eugenics in that way and the legacies that are still being felt today.”
Fleming said the university brought in external organisations and artists “to open up that question and think about how [we can] be a better institution in the future.”
Liam Spencer is one of 12 artists who contributed to the exhibition. On its opening night, his intimate yet powerful spoken word performance echoed through the halls of UCL East’s campus.
A poet by trade, Spencer - known professionally as Annotate - has performed for TNT Sports, the Tate Modern and the Tower of London.
Words Matter offered him a new challenge: to take an issue as heavy as eugenics and condense it into a short audio-drama piece, a form he had never written for before.
Beneath the Cracks combines Spencer’s own experiences and broader history, inviting audiences to follow the rise of a promising young poet facing unexpected hostility.
Spencer said: “I was like, how can I tap into that [his own experience] and also go back to eugenics and introduce people to it in a way that doesn't feel too much to take on at one time?”
Eugenics is a widely discredited set of scientific practices and beliefs which aims to improve the genetic quality of human beings. Eugenicists have historically promoted human selective breeding to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded at the time as desirable.
Often associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, eugenics was initially developed as a field of study right here in London.
Galton, who coined the term, set up the Eugenics Records Office at UCL in 1904 and funded a professional chair of eugenics at the university. Teaching of the subject began in 1911 under Pearson.
Spencer said: “Before I became a part of this, I had absolutely no idea that UCL had this history with eugenics.”
The likes of William Beveridge, TS Eliot and DH Lawrence expressed sympathies with the movement while Winston Churchill sat as the vice-president of the first International Eugenics Conference at UCL in 1912.
It wasn’t until 2020 that Galton’s and Pearson’s names were removed from UCL’s buildings and spaces. The following year, the university issued a formal apology expressing ‘regret’ for its historical ties to the practice.
However, in 2018, it was revealed that a conference examining the alleged links between race and intelligence had been secretly held at the university for the previous four years.
The university said an honorary lecturer had managed to book university rooms for the London Conference on Intelligence without the management’s knowledge, something which has since ended.
Words Matter is part of a wider cultural programme by UCL seeking to address its past and the ongoing impact of structural discrimination within the university and society as a whole.
Spencer said he appreciated the genuine engagement of the people he has worked with at UCL, allowing artists to explore the subject in whatever way they wished.
He added: “I think there’s always going to be those problems because it’s kind of embedded in the institutional makeup, isn’t it?”
The exhibition is a collaboration between UCL and four specialist organisations: Brownton Abbey, CRIPtic Arts, The New Black Film Collective and UD Music.
All of them helped to select the participating artists and supported a six-month knowledge exchange programme which aimed to interrogate notions of ‘normality’ and ‘superiority.’
No piece explores this more deftly than A Watchmaker’s Wish. Sonny Nwachukwu’s film follows an elderly man struggling to belong in a world which rejects him for his stammering voice.
It highlights how society is still dominated by ‘norms’ when it comes to speech and ability, how often voices that conform to this are valued higher than those that do not.
Black Superheroes by Danny Bailey is a celebration of Black bodies in spite of racist ideologies like eugenics wishing to distort how they are seen.
At first, Bailey used Galton’s photographic methods of composite portrait photography but ultimately decided “you can’t dismantle the master’s house with his tools.”
Instead, his focus on joy, colour and laughter aims to mock Galton’s pseudoscientific work.
The other artists involved in the exhibition are Rachel Gadsden, Miss Jacqui, Vernoica McKenzie, The Oracle Collective, NAYANA AB, Anjelo Disons, Malaika Kamure, Simi Roach, Lasana Shabazz and Ray Young.
Words Matter is free to visit and on display at UCL East – Marshgate, 7 Sidings Street, E20 2AE and is open daily between 10am and 6pm until 25 February, 2026.
