About

With education and research as the primary activities of the school, our primary objective is to foster and facilitate committed, talented and creative individuals to help deliver planning’s evolving agenda, working across the private, public and voluntary sectors. Major challenges face planning graduates, include:

• The deterioration of global and local environments and climate change;
• The regeneration of declining or under-utilised urban and rural assets;
• The opportunities and threats posed by globalisation and new technologies;
• Changing living patterns and redistributing populations;
• The delivery of high quality public and private environments.

Our educational philosophy regards planning as a subject that must draw broadly from social, economic and policy sciences, as well as a design discipline. We seek to deliver an education which ensures that graduates are design-articulate and can link across several disciplines, can understand the social, economic and policy context of places and are capable of formulating and designing proposals that change and shape places. We take full advantage of our London location and believe that no other UK planning school has such diverse and deep roots in a world city, together with links to other world cities. We prepare graduates to respond to planning challenges at any spatial scale, wherever they may appear.

Our main building, Central House, is located in Bloomsbury in the heart of London on UCL's main campus.

As well as dedicated study spaces and IT facilities, students have access to the Bartlett library (located in the same building), and to all UCL's facilities and amenities. The University of London (of which UCL is a part) and British libraries are also available.

You’ll have access to the largest concentration of built environment professionals in the world in the form of London's burgeoning planning, property, urban design and development sector.

PhD students are each allocated a space in our dedicated PhD room housed within the School.

The Bartlett School of Planning is one of the oldest and most respected Schools of planning in the world. We celebrated our centenary in 2014. Read more about the celebration here.

During our history, many of the world’s most notable academics in planning have worked with us, including Sir Patrick Abercrombie, Ruth Glass, Lord William Holford, Nat Lichfield, Lord Richard Llewelyn-Davies, Mike Batty and Sir Peter Hall.

Today, our professors are some of the leading figures in their fields. See our People page.

The School of planning holds two Green Impact Platinum awards. You can download our Green Policy here.