UCL has entered the initial phases of its £500m “Bloomsbury Masterplan”, management’s strategic plan for the fu- ture, and it’s not looking too pretty out there. In September it was made public that UCL management will close the Gower Place Practice next year. The service is nowhere mentioned in the Masterplan. “UCL has informed us that it has no plans to renew our lease when it expires in 2014. It does not wish to provide a space for the NHS practice on the UCL campus”, Dr Clare Elliot, a partner in the practice told us. 15,000 UCL students who use the practice will have to look for a GP elsewhere and the staff at the practice will lose their jobs. This magazine has gained special access to a full draft of the Masterplan docu- ment - only the summary is available to the public - and baby, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
UCL management’s vision is of a shiny, colourful, airy new campus with open-plan seating, “student-hubs” and coffee bars galore, but the cost of these new developments will be immense. Li- braries, lecture theatres, offices, class- rooms and labs will be moved, down- sized and in some cases lost altogether. The most ambitious project will be the merging of the main library and the sci- ence library. The science library will be moved into the basement of the Wilkins Building. “Releasing and reconfigur- ing” the building’s basement will appar- ently create enough space for the entire science collection, believes the Master- plan document. One doesn’t have to be a scientist to realise that the amount of shelf and work space will be reduced considerably. Much of the collection will go into stores, possibly on the new Stratford campus, the plan suggests.
Entire departments are to be moved and downsized; academics and students alike will be dis- advantaged by the changes. The His- tory Department, which currently oc- cupies several of the Georgian houses on Gordon Square, will be moved into the much smaller site of Gor- don House. The Bartlett will first be moved into Central House on Woburn Place and then moved a second time into the DMS Watson building, formerly the science li- brary. Geographers from Bedford Way will be “co-located” - IE crammed in - with graduate geographers in the Pearson build- ing. The ground floor of Life Sciences will be integrated into the anatomy building. A “number of Union services” are earmarked to move into the new student centre be- ing built on the empty site next to history. The Print Room café will be demolished to make way for a new staircase.
How will entire faculties fit into their new premises? Simple: UCL management intend to abolish individual offices. Accord- ing to the plans, the offices of academic and administrative staff will be changed from “cell-like environments” to “den-like envi- ronments”; UCL aims to “achieve higher occupant densities and lower operating costs”. Faculty office space will be reduced from 21 per cent of total space currently, to as little as 10 per cent, a significant loss. Responding to a Cheese Grater comment on the subject, Professor Alister Scott of Birmingham City University wrote: “I have to work in open plan and whilst efficient for admin managers is useless for doing work. I go home to work”. The worst part is exactly what the spaces vacated by aca- demics will be used for.
UCL’s corporate wing will expand markedly. Estates, the Registry, Finance and Human Resources office space will grow from 5 per cent currently to as much as 25 per cent in the future, which would make these activities the single largest us- ers of university space. Exactly why UCL’s auxiliary services require so much space is uncertain. The houses vacated by history on Gordon square will be turned into lux- ury apartments and a “social lounge” for what the Masterplan vaguely terms “visi- tors” to the university.
Up to ten new cafés are going to open on campus; this is on top of the six that already exist. Going on college’s previous choices, these will likely be Costas or Star- bucks. Again, the reasoning behind such a steep increase in the number of externally run cafés is not alluded to by the college. Malet Place will be transformed into a “teaching and learning ‘high street’”, with retailers invited in to set up shop in “under-used areas”. “Com- mercial opportunities” are mentioned throughout the Masterplan. Artists’ im- pressions have glass front- ages to every accessible ground floor, making the re-developed campus look a lot like a shopping centre.
UCL senior manage- ment refer to the Master- plan as a “living document”, suggesting not all of it will be implemented. And yet, much of it is now coming into effect. Archaeology, Anthropology and Classics had their first taste of things to come when management began to plan a redevelopment of these departments early last year. In September a senior faculty member of Anthropology sent an impassioned email to students de- tailing UCL’s intentions: the ground floors of these departments will become a large “student hub” and a Starbucks. Offices, a lecture theatre, a common room and a small museum will be demolished. Asking that the students occupy the space whilst UCL management and the architects looked around, the senior lecturer wrote, “as staff we find this whole prospect horrendous”.
UCL management is attempting to keep as much of the Masterplan imple- mentation behind the scenes, apparently gagging academics involved. When asked to comment on the “student hub” plans, the head of Anthropology, Professor Su- sanne Kuechler, told us that she was “ada- mant” we should not report on them as “negotiations are complex and sensitive”. It’s not incorrect to assume there must be many other Masterplan projects now underway at UCL, most of them behind closed doors.