> I imagine that a knighted professor at Imperial can comfortably access a mortgage in London

You don't get paid for being knighted. And these universities have a mostly fixed pay scale it's not like Google where you can just demand whatever you want if you're good enough.

Well, there does exist a fixed pay scale for base salaries, but for senior academic grades in many occasions this simply defines the minimum salary, and the rest is negotiable (particularly if the academic has a good record of obtaining research grants).

Then again, there exist Business Schools, where due to the different funding model (most income comes from MBAs, as opposed to research grant overheads, and undergraduate tuition fees), full professors can easily make near-£200k in base salary.

Even with a salary of 200k per year, it's unlikely they will be able to afford a 2 or 3 bedroom flat in South Kensington. According to Zoopla/Foxtons, the average price is around 2M.

Senior professors negotiate their pay.

I don't know what you think that looks like in practice... but it's going to be very very modest at a British public university.

No not really. With the average price of a house in London approaching £1m https://www.home.co.uk/guides/house_prices.htm?location=lond... and an average professor at Imperial earning £80k https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/Imperial-College-London-P...

Looking more closely on glassdoor: it's unlikely to be true that Imperial professor salaries average £80k and University College London salaries average £101k, and these figures are more likely biased by small, self-selecting samples.

[Updated to note: Imperial College quotes a fixed minimum salary of £79,080 for professors in 2019 with performance-related increases - so the Glassdoor figures quoting lower than that cannot be right]

The home.co.uk site quotes the median price of property listings is £600k (is that close to £1m? ok sure). It also identifies that houses priced higher than that are listed for significantly longer, i.e. they count with more weight in this stat despite not selling. Therefore, I understand the median sale price to be lower.

>I imagine that a knighted professor at Imperial can comfortably access a mortgage in London

You have a lot to learn about the London housing market and UK salaries.