For more than a millennium, King Ethelred’s has advanced engineering, science and the art of sounding completely certain while holding a cup of tea.
*According to the 2026 Upper Piddlington Institutional Excellence Survey, conducted in-house.
Oxford has dreaming spires. Cambridge has bicycles. King Ethelred’s has a test rig that definitely should have been decommissioned in 1974.
Our students learn first principles, rigorous analysis and the vital professional skill of knowing which end of a soldering iron becomes regrettable.
Explore admissions →New prospectus: Defensive Engineering (Not Moving), Materials Engineering with Biscuits and fifteen others →
From Apollo computing to corrugated aerodynamics, our researchers pursue awkward technical questions until either the data or the departmental kettle gives way.
See current research →New analysis: Two Legs and a Flag: Sealand surveyed as a structure and a state, and the Trebuchet Group refused →
Matriculation, the Founder’s Spoon, the Annual Inspection of the Boilers and other traditions whose documentary origins are pleasingly indistinct.
Learn the customs →Is the phone in your pocket really more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer? Yes. Is that the interesting part? Not remotely.
A recent dissertation from the Department of Aeronautical Engineering and Applied Mathematics examines raw compute, deterministic real-time control and the wider Apollo computing ecosystem.
The Apollo Guidance Computer, modern smartphones, and the Apollo Program computing complex.
H. A. Fotheringham, B.Sc. (Hons.) King Ethelred’s
Hoodies, T-shirts, caps, scarves, mugs, badges and the College provisions without which no serious institution can function: branded tea and peer-reviewed biscuits.
Ideal for students, alumni, visiting academics and anyone who has ever wanted clothing from a university that predates the concept of accurate record keeping.
From the £9.78 Senior Common Room tea blend to the heavyweight College hoodie.
*Official in Upper Piddlington, which is the only jurisdiction presently under review.
Three months of experimental work has established, with 95% confidence, that the Junkers Ju 52 would have been smoother had it been smoother.
The facility features redundant boiling elements, an N+1 teabag architecture and the College’s first ISO 9001-compliant biscuit tin.
The Department of Temporal Logistics insists the service remains on schedule, although it has declined to specify which schedule.
“Oxford teaches you to think. Cambridge teaches you to reason. Ethelred’s teaches you where the isolator switch is.”— attributed to Prof. Sir Alastair Wrench, sometime Regius Professor of Applied Common Sense