A major attempt to bring about changes in London which would inevitably involve the existing University was three-pronged, and began in the mid- 1880s. An attack on all fronts, as it were, was made by a body established in 1884, called the Association for the Promotion of a Teaching University for London – hereinafter the Association. Membership of it was wide, but its basic support was concentrated in UCL and KCL. Those two Colleges were to adopt the main propositions in the Association’s scheme and then to make a determined effort to have themselves recognised as the nucleus of a new Teaching University, quite separate from the existing University of London.

An equally comprehensive campaign was launched from within the existing University community by Convocation. But from the outset that campaign, though it caused deep trauma within Convocation, took for granted the desirability of there being only one institution for the city – a modified version of the existing University of London.

Despite their disagreements, the Association, UCL and KCL, and Convocation, all regarded it as natural and desirable that a university should be a multi-faculty organisation. However, either from conviction or from impatience with an unsatisfactory status quo, there were powerful people in the medical profession – primarily the controlling majority of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Surgeons, with encouragement from the Metropolitan Branch of the BMA – who professed indifference to the argument that there were overriding advantages in having the study of medicine carried on alongside other disciplines, within a normal, multi-faculty university. They were not only uninterested in reform within the existing University of London: they were also uninterested in joining with other non-medical institutions in forming a new university, separate altogether from the University of London. They were prepared to consider the creation of a one-faculty university, by empowering a combination of the existing Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons to confer degrees in Medicine and Surgery.

At the same time, in addition to the arguments about which institutions should exist, and in what forms, a group of senior academics at UCL, joined at a later stage by colleagues from elsewhere, began to press for the acceptance of the principle of professorial control of any teaching university – a move which provoked considerable controversy during the following decade, when it developed into a demand for a centralised, rather than a federal or quasi-federal institution.