Physics University choice

As someone who has grown up in Birmingham, while it's a good uni, the city is a ****hole and it's place in the league tables fluctuates significantly, so you can probably rule it out. Durham and St Andrews ensure an excellent standard of education, however the cities are quite isolated and so are perfect if you want the proper "campus feel" but not ideal if you value easy access to locations or big city facilities. Imperial and UCL are excellent but in central London, so transport and accommodation will be extraordinarily expensive, and so will not be ideal if you are short on money. I cannot advice on any of the others.

Good luck!

Ngl I'd go to manchester if I was doing physics.

is it a good city over all?

Who cares. You get taught by some of the most interesting people, not to metion Brian Cox.

really do not want to get stabbed while im sleeping but holy ****, brain cox? what part of physics does he teach

(to be honest if you were going to take city stereotypes that seriously, I'm surprised you went with 3 london universities!)

Getting taught by leading researchers/famous scientists can be a double-edged sword - it means teaching can be a bit further down their priority list. But it is cool to think that "oh wow I bumped into the guy in this field"

With Imperial they do race through further maths content at the start of the first term. So further maths A-level isn't a requirement, but it would be a big help if you got familiar with some of the content before you started. I was told by one of the staff that the physics course there is regarded as one of the hardest - 2nd year was particularly notorious, although they've just reformed the course so we'll see how it turns out.

I was really surprised to find out a physicist of his stature is teaching.
Surely the first term must be taught a slow pace, do you happen to know why this is? and Did the staff tell you any specific topics?

Stephen Hawking was still a professor at Cambridge until 2009...! although I seriously doubt he'd have given any lectures lol.
Perhaps that was an exaggeration. It's not so much that they start at a slow pace, but more that they teach it completely from scratch - i.e. beginning with the basic definition of a function, Newton's laws of motion, what a vector is, what the imaginary unit is, etc., and steadily building everything up. The complex numbers content in further maths A-level was covered in probably less than a month, but at the same time there are other topics being covered in other lectures. So it seems like it goes quickly.
Also when everyone there has an A* in maths also many having done further maths they're able to do it quickly