⚠️ AI-generated demonstration, not a verified historical record

Every part of this page was produced by an AI system working from the preserved newsletters and the published case data. No human has checked it.

Some things here are checked mechanically and some are not, and the difference matters more than a general disclaimer would suggest. Every quotation is verified as an exact substring of the document it cites, so the words in the tooltips really do appear in the sources. Everything around them is unverified: whether the right events were selected, whether each has been read correctly, whether the dates and categories are right, whether the commentary is sound, and whether anything important is missing. The lag figures rest on pairings an AI system judged to be causal, and those judgements have not been reviewed.

Treat this as a demonstration of what the underlying dataset makes possible, not as a chronology of UCL's pandemic response to rely on, quote or cite. Anyone wanting to use a fact from here should open the newsletter it cites and read it in context first.

UCL and the pandemic

347 dated events between 9 March 2020 and 11 May 2022: 283 decisions UCL took, 26 national and sector measures they respond to, and 38 readings from the case series UCL published. Every event carries a verbatim quotation from the document that announced it, checked mechanically against the preserved source.

Hover or focus any mark for the events on that day.Tap any mark for the events on that day. The case panels share one time axis with the lanes above them and with each other. Camden is drawn in its own panel rather than on the same scale: it peaks near six thousand cases in a week against UCL's five hundred, so a shared axis would flatten every UCL line. Both panels show the same quantity, confirmed cases per week.

This page needs JavaScript for the filters, the crosshair and the tooltips. The chart itself is drawn server-side and is fully visible without it, and every event with its full quotation is in TIMELINE.md and timeline.csv.

Students, on campus Students, off campus Staff, on campus Staff, off campus Camden borough

Background: No legal restrictions Limited measures Substantial restrictions Stay-at-home lockdown

Reading this chart

The four lanes are the four tracks of the ledger, separated by position rather than colour so that the categorical palette is free for the case series. One mark is one day in one lane: several decisions often landed on a single day, and a mark for each would overplot into a smear implying a density the record does not support. The tooltip lists what happened on that day in the categories currently selected, so a mark never speaks for a category you have filtered out.

Drag sideways across the chart to zoom into a date range. Only the time axis moves; the case scales stay put, so a zoomed view cannot make a rise look steeper than it is. Double-click to zoom back out, or use the date boxes, which take the range you drag and can be typed into directly.The chart is wider than this screen: drag sideways to move through the period. To narrow it, use the date boxes above. Zooming moves only the time axis; the case scales stay put, so a zoomed view cannot make a rise look steeper than it is.

The background shading is how strict the legal restrictions were, on one scale from no shading at all when nothing was in force to the darkest step for a stay-at-home order. It is drawn in neutral greys because the bands are regions rather than series, and a categorical hue there would impersonate one. The regime is named along the top and in full on hovering that label; a vertical rule marks every change. The shading follows what applied in England, and in London wherever England was tiered.

Ten of the thirteen shaded regimes begin on a date taken from a cited row of the ledger or from the research synthesis. Three do not — 13 May 2020, 20 December 2020, 29 March 2021 — and come from the general England chronology with no source in this archive behind them. They are marked as unchecked in the configuration and want verifying against the regulations.

The dates are the days measures came into force rather than the days they were announced, so the shading changes a few days to the right of the announcement on the National lane. That gap is the point: the chronology gives the lag in days wherever a UCL action responds to a national one. A stay-at-home order is a legal test and not a measure of how closed the university was — the second national lockdown is shaded as darkly as the first while UCL stayed open, which is exactly the divergence the UCL lane is there to show.

The full chronology, with every quotation and the lag in days wherever a UCL action responds to a national one, is in TIMELINE.md. The ledger behind both is timeline.csv.

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