Anyone who has ever worked in a University department knows full well how ridiculous these rankings are. They are largely gimmicks. The Guardian's one has been

Anyone who has ever worked in a University department knows full well how ridiculous these rankings are. They are largely gimmicks. The Guardian's one has been literally compiled by one person for decades. The others heavily weight 'student experience'. Student experience is a terrible way to rank the quality of the University education, because students complain when material is difficult. When I worked at one University, I remember sitting and having a coffee with the admissions tutor for my department and another staff member, who'd got a teenage kid who was going to University to study the same subject he was a lecturer in. He'd gone round taking mental notes for the admissions tutor and was relaying all the good and bad things that they'd done at each of the Universities he'd visited with his son for open days. Frankly in the UK, there's basically a few Universities that are incredible at everything (Oxford, Cambridge), some that are good at specific things (LSE, Imperial), and then the remainder of the Russell Group are much of a muchness in quality with some departments better than others. There's really not much difference in quality between a student from Durham and a student from Nottingham or a student at UCL; they have similar entry grades, the quality of education is similar, the departments are staffed similarly. One of the biggest differences which actually has an impact is more about the later year courses and what is available, usually as a result of the research interests of staff. For e.g. where I did my undergraduate degree in physics had a very strong condensed matter theory group, and so there was a focus on that sort of thing in some of the more advanced mathematical courses, where in another University there might have been more of a focus on astrophysics or particle physics.