What Your Halls Say About You

Glen Eyre

You’re the halls everyone knows about. You’re in all the prospectuses. Bright eyed freshers skip around your room on tours making daisy chains. You’re right by campus. Life is a dream, right? Wrong. There’s bus-shaming and stigmatisation when you’re expected to walk a whole five yards up to your flat after you’ve had a long, hard day. Nobody understands.

Mayflower

If you use five pound notes as loo roll you probably live here. Near the train station so you can take trips to Central London rather than doing your degree, next to theatre so you can pretend you’re cultured and a short walk away from West Quay because omigosh shopping! Usually inhabited by those who have way too much student loan that what they know what to do with.

City Gateway

McDonald’s.

Wessex Lane

Congratulations! You are the new Bencraft! Which in short means everyone makes fun of you for being poor behind your back. From now on, you are no longer that place with the ugly scaffolding. You are now that place with the ugly scaffolding which drains all the money which could be used on facilities like a common room. Use the Connaught facilities, they say, but then again you do quite like the idea of not being hung drawn and quartered by the residents for going into their territory. Enjoy getting emails for phantom parcels whilst you aren’t notified on any actual deliveries for months and just let the howling of drunken students outside your window rock you to sleep.

Connaught

Your parents never loved you. You were brought up by either a nanny or a boarding school, and so with no life skills, you choose to go into the halls where everything is done for you. You switch between eating the yummy dinner the Matron prepared for you to numbing your internal agony by repeatedly going off and on the U1A for about three hours with the sole purpose of verbally abusing Monte students because those weirdoes can cook for themselves and have functional relationships.

Archers Road

It’s like a University-affiliated crack house, so roll up and ruin your life under the guise of good decision making so your parents will still be proud of you. It’s only a short distance from Avenue Campus which you will never go to because not only are lectures for losers, but also your dealer is there and you haven’t paid them back yet. Them being an archaeology student, you know that they’ll be able to hide your body with no trace, and failing a degree is better than being stabbed to death with a used syringe. You may or may not have been sold a bag of ground leaves from the Common during Freshers and be told it was weed.

Bencraft (RIP)

The rotting corpses in the crematorium next door still have more money than you. You are probably doing a Humanities degree anyway so by going in such a disgusting hall, you are preparing yourself for what the real world will be like post-graduation. Mould-related illnesses apparently aren’t applicable for special consideration, and you’re fairly sure that mysterious misty tap water is urine. But it’s okay, you really get a chance to make life-long friends with the maintenance men here so much to try and salvage that crumbling wreck of a building. And even now, with Bencraft closed down, you still sometimes see your fellow survivors around campus and you give them a little nod of respect because they just KNOW what it was like in the trenches. Nobody else could understand. Sometimes you go past the Bassett Co-Op and get Vietnam flashbacks.

Highfield

Sorry, who are you? Is that a thing…? Do you like, live at the interchange?

Liberty Point

“Ugh, paupers. We might be the same standard as Mayflower and in a slightly more obscure location but we’re STILL better than you because we are PRIVATE RENTED so bow down losers.” That’s within the first five minutes of talking to a Liberty Point resident. The name is rather fitting as the students there take Liberties with their wealth and you can’t understand the Point of there being a private hall apart from just making the residents feel a bit special. They stick together in packs like wolves with Michael Kors handbags and run away screaming if they see someone with a Wessex Lane T-shirt.

Private Rented

They got in through clearing and don’t even know what their course is. Through living in the city centre, they will soon learn to rely on drink to get them through the year until they inevitably admit this was a massive mistake and go back home. They spend their days bashing the intelligence of Solent students to fit in and then they go home to the Solent flatmates they share with and sleep with them.