Royal College of Art

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The Royal College of Art (RCA) in London is one of the most prestigious art and design schools in the world. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the United Kingdom: students join after a first degree, for master's and doctoral studies. For almost two centuries it has trained artists, designers, architects, fashion designers and film-makers, and for years it has been ranked first in the world for art and design in the QS international rankings.

From the School of Design to the Royal College

The school was founded in 1837 at Somerset House in London as the Government School of Design, set up by the state to train designers who could improve the quality of the products of British industry, which was then losing ground to French competition. In 1853 it moved to Marlborough House and then to South Kensington, on the same site as the museum that would become the Victoria and Albert Museum: school and museum were born as a single project, promoted by Henry Cole and Prince Albert after the Great Exhibition of 1851. After several changes of name, in September 1896 it received the name Royal College of Art, and teaching shifted to the practice of art and design.

The post-war years and growth

After the Second World War, under the leadership of its rector Robin Darwin, the college was profoundly renewed and became a centre of modern British design. Between 1960 and 1963 its new home, the Darwin Building in Kensington Gore, next to the Royal Albert Hall, was built. In 1967 the college received a royal charter giving it the power to award its own degrees. In recent decades it has expanded with new campuses at Battersea, where the Dyson Building opened in 2012, and at White City (2017).

The alumni

The list of RCA alumni is impressive. It includes sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, painters such as David Hockney, Peter Blake and Bridget Riley, artists such as Tracey Emin, fashion designers such as Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes, and the film directors Ridley and Tony Scott. In industrial design the standouts are James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, who was also the college's provost from 2011 to 2017, and David Mellor; among more recent designers, Thomas Heatherwick, creator of the London 2012 Olympic cauldron, and the architect David Adjaye. Among its teachers was Ron Arad, who headed the Design Products department from 1997 to 2009.

A school for the future

Today the RCA combines traditional disciplines, such as painting, sculpture, ceramics and jewellery, with new fields such as innovation design, service design, robotics and design for sustainability, often in collaboration with Imperial College and with industry. It remains true to the idea on which it was founded almost two centuries ago, the same idea as the Arts and Crafts movement and the Deutscher Werkbund: art and design should serve to improve objects and everyday life.