The classic uni student conversation goes as follows: “What’s your name, what do you study, where are you from?”. If you’re a Fresher, you’ll also get, “What accom are you in?”
When I say, “Astor College, how about you?”, the common response is almost always, “Wow, that’s fancy. You’re lucky.”
But Astor really isn’t all that, and let me explain why.
Astor was renovated over the summer, so you would expect everything to be in top shape for the incoming students.
Upon arrival on the seventh floor, I was first greeted with a heatwave, comparable to opening the oven to check on your chicken nuggets and almost getting your eyebrows burnt off.
I then proceeded to my assigned room, and I thought, “Wow, it’s cute, let me open a window, though”. I open, or try to open, the window to find out I can’t open it more than about 10 centimetres, “for my protection”. The seventh floor has a balcony that wraps around the building, so the protection in question is to save me from a 30 centimetre drop. How life-threatening.
London has been getting colder these days, but not Astor. My floormate used his thermometer to measure the temperature of the walls, and the result was a scorching 28°C. Astor’s residents are being slow-cooked.
This makes sleep an active battle. You’re twisting and turning from the heat, you have the window open for the smallest difference it will make, and just as you’re about to fall asleep, the local crackhead starts singing ‘Hallelujah’ at the top of his lungs and ten sirens are blaring in the distance.
In my first month, I kept thinking, “Good thing that window has restrictors right now”.
Astor’s builders seemed to have been ordered on Wish, same as the kitchen appliances that have a mind of their own. Each bedroom door has a murky glass window above it, so if you have difficulty sleeping with the lights on, good luck. The combination of the hallway light glaring into your room 24/7, the five green lights on the ceiling from the fire alarm and other miscellaneous devices I can’t name, and the heat, makes Astor feel like an incubator.
The best hasn’t come yet, though.
Another not-so-pleasant surprise upon arrival was the toilet situation, and what a scam that is.
Online, I read that the Astor toilets are distributed so that one flat of six residents shares three toilets. I easily located my toilets but wondered where the rest of the toilets for the floor are. Oh! What’s that? Two flats of seven to ten people share three toilets? Surely not, right?
No, since two toilets were defective for one and a half months (again, post-renovation), 14 people shared one toilet. That singular toilet was cleaned once a week. Lovely right? Real fancy indeed.
I had the pleasure of seeing brown modern art in the toilet bowl every day, and every time I walked into the bathroom, my trousers got soaked in someone’s shower water, as it was flooded daily.
Astor is also super high security. So high, even its own residents don’t get let in sometimes! Proper bang for your buck, I say!
My flatmate lost his student ID, which is also the keycard to our rooms. He walked up to the not-so-friendly security guard at the front desk at 4am and asked to be let into his room. Mind you, the front desk has a book with our names, faces and room numbers.
The security guard’s response was basically “not my problem, figure it out”, leaving an 18-year-old roofless for a night in central London
The list goes on, but the takeaway message is no, Astor is not super fancy. It’s exploitation for the price and crap we have to put up with, to say the least.
The only redeeming factors are its location and the lovely people who work at the front desk (not security).
