Campus accommodation- a sliding scale?
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As a first-term fresher at York, I guess I am lucky and not a little boastful to say that residing in Barbara Scott Court in Vanbrugh College has proven to be a blissful experience. The premium rooms, complete with en-suite, are a luxury. Let's not ignore a kitchen so large that exclamations of 'WOW your kitchen is so big!' are followed by all who enter. Sure, we have to GET OUT over Easter, but it's a pretty small price to pay (the actual price being about the same as a shoddy catered house in Derwent).
Certainly it is nice to live in 'Vanbrugh Palace', or 'Posh Vanbrugh', being the most charming ground on Hes West. But it does bring to question why the rest of Vanbrugh is stuck with small rooms and shitty exterior buildings. Not to mention the kitchens of Fairfax said to hold a grand total of four people, yet aimed for about thirty. (As an approximation - it might have been sixty). Going from Vanbrugh Palace to Derwent feels like going from middle-class suburbia to a council estate in East London.
Sure, it's nice to be in a part of the uni where you're close to town (and Nisa) AND live like royalty. Contrary to those on Hes East, residing in the glory of Constantine's deluxe rooms yet being in the middle of nowhere. (Unless you count fields and a giant sports centre). It does make me wonder, though, why the university doesn't up its game and make all of the Hes West accommodation as nice as V Palace and Alcuin. It would make for less of a social-class division feeling that doesn't seem to make any sense or serve any purpose.
1 Comment
Anon Posted on Saturday 21 Nov 2015
Simple answer is that all the accommodation is mortgaged up to its hilt. There just isn't the money to focus it - those extortionate rents you pay (which, incidentally have genuinely doubled since 2007) go towards banks and investors, nothing's left to actually make the rooms less shit. And my god are they shit.
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