Inadequate lighting forced the 2025 Welcome Fair, held on Thursday 25 September, to shut early. 11,000 students made the trek to UCL East for the main event in the freshers’ week calendar, with clubs and societies making their pitch to new students. Attendees found long queues, crowded marquees, and parched society reps.
Although the Welcome Fair was scheduled to end at 8pm, with many students booking their timed tickets for 6:30 or 7pm, it was forced to shut an hour early due to inadequate lighting.
It would have been clear that additional lighting would be necessary, since the outdoor event on Marshgate Plaza was supposed to end at 8pm — well after sunset at 6:52pm.
When asked for comment, the Students’ Union told The Cheese Grater, “We bought in additional lighting to mitigate this, however when setting up the fair and testing the additional lighting, we weren’t satisfied that it was sufficient.”
Additionally, a staff member present at the 6 October Union Executive meeting said that “the sunset was earlier than we had anticipated in the planning”. This is despite the time of a sunset being very easy to look up.
Union officers also said that the lighting testing was only undertaken the day before. This means that many attendees were only told that they should turn up earlier on Wednesday evening, less than 24 hours before the fair.
As many students are not in the habit of checking their email frequently during freshers’ week, they made the journey out to UCL East only to be turned away at the gate, wasting £7 and an hour and a half of their evening.
The distant location (due to the quad renovations) may have caused the fall in attendance by 3,000 students from 2024.
The issues also highlighted concerns about lighting on the UCL East campus: one of the Union’s policies is to “Lobby UCL to evaluate enhancing the lighting infrastructure across campus”.
The Marshgate Plaza has no permanent lighting, despite being the route from the Marshgate building to the nearest public road and DLR station.
No plans for water
The Welcome Fair was scheduled to be ten hours long, and yet the Union made no provisions for the welfare of the people staffing the stands: there were seemingly no concrete plans for providing them with water.
Around 4pm, a Cheese Grater journalist alongside the Sabb team was asked to head to the nearby M&S and hijack a trolley to distribute water to the committee members running the stalls — not exactly the level of logistical rigour you’d expect from the country’s biggest Students’ Union.
Their biggest test will be next year, when they plan to play a key role in the UCL200 celebrations, including holding a week-long festival. After what happened at the Welcome Fair, it remains to be seen whether they can successfully pull off their biggest event yet.
A Students’ Union spokesperson said:
“This was the first time we’d held a large scale event on the Marshgate plaza, and we were very conscious of daylight availability during the planning phase, especially when the event was scheduled to end at 20:00. We bought in additional lighting to mitigate this, however when setting up the fair and testing the additional lighting, we weren’t satisfied that it was sufficient. We didn’t want to take any risks, so bought the event end time forward to 19:00, with the last ticketed entry slot at 18:00. We contacted all ticket holders with slots at 18:30 and 19:00 to apologise and notify them of the change in time, we also made clear their tickets would now be valid at any time of the day. Using a new venue for the first time required us to make agile decisions for the best interests and safety of those attending, and we are pleased the event was a success overall.”
