Luxury student flats reveal gap between haves and have nots
ONE of the oxymorons of modern life I will never get my head around is “luxury student flats”.
How can you even call yourself a student if you live in “luxury” accommodation?
Roughing it in hall of residence box rooms or shared houses that haven’t been redecorated since 1976 is part of the character-building journey of university.
Our student digs were never going to get five stars on Trip Advisor.
Even the rooms that looked vaguely presentable had the unmistakeable aroma of generations of student activity – a mixture of Pot Noodle, drying socks and stale vomit.
The only accessorising that took place involved a slab of Blu Tack and a trip to Athena – no Ikea in those days.
Every soak in the communal bathroom was accompanied by the terror that the lock didn’t work and a mudencrusted first XV Neanderthal might burst in at any moment.
When we lived out, the small kitchen in our shared terraced house was extremely basic but then so were our culinary skills.
Something involving mince and tomato puree was usually enough to impress the housemates – particularly my friend who kept loaves and frozen peas in the freezer and lived off pea sandwiches for three terms.
Not that I’m in a position to judge having survived on a diet of lager and the menu of the baked potato van that was permanently parked 100 metres from the college lodge.
The only decorative feature of the communal kitchen were the bright yellow Post-It notes written by a scary girl from Belfast who left us such charming missives as “Keep your effing hands of my effing butter!”
When I pointed out to the landlord that my room should include a desk, meanwhile, he arrived the next day with a wallpaper-pasting table.
Our house, however, was palatial compared to the silverfish-infested hovel my tutorial partner and her pals inhabited.
I’d never seen partition walls divide bay windows before. The three-bar electric heaters provided a sinister glow but no actual warmth.
Indeed I spent one night sleeping on the floor there quietly weeping, convinced I would die of hypothermia and be found the next morning frozen to the swirls on the nylon carpet.
But do you know what? We wouldn’t have changed a thing.
We never expected lavish living conditions.
We made the best of our primitive digs and the lack of glamour only served to strengthen our camaraderie.
In fact, gathering for a college reunion to mark 30 years since we first met, we returned to that shared house, recalled the fun we’d had there and took a nostalgic selfie in front of its wheelie bins.
Fast forward three decades and premium student accommodation is spreading through British cities like architectural Japanese knotweed. Cardiff is a particular hotbed of luxury flats for freshers with ugly phallic apartment blocks popping up across the city, razing more characterful buildings in their wake.
The blurb for some of them sounds like PR for lofts in New York rather than a block of flats on City Road. “The latest experience in urban student living. Redefining student accommodation as you know it, our vision is to create a student community you’ll love to belong to,” purrs the advert.
“Big beautiful bedrooms, megafast broadband, all-day all-night concierge, room cleaning, laundry, cinema, social/study spaces, special events, a fully loaded gym, free use of our bikes all go to ensure you have everything you need, all safely under one roof. It’s not just somewhere to live, it’s a lifestyle.”
If you can afford it that is. A studio in this kind of development costs up to £200 a week, making it an option for the wealthy foreign students and privileged few who are the target market.
University accommodation used to be a leveller across the student demographic – it didn’t matter
Accommodation used to be a leveller across the student demographic – it didn’t matter... how rich your parents were