At 3:17 am on a Wednesday morning, a Cheese Grater journalist witnessed a resident of Astor College place an entire frozen chicken breast directly onto an unlit hob before leaving the kitchen entirely.
This is life inside Astor.
Marketed as UCL’s premier student residence, Astor College promises “modern living” in the heart of Bloomsbury, many arrive expecting luxury.
What they receive instead is an immersive correctional facility with occasional plumbing.
For years, Astor has occupied a near-mythological status amongst incoming freshers: the newest accommodation, the nicest kitchens, the en-suite bathrooms – it’s the dream hall. Parents speak of it in hushed tones during open days. Offer holders online refer to securing a place there as “winning the lottery”.
Within approximately forty-eight hours of move-in, however, residents begin to understand the truth.
“It’s basically a Scandinavian prison designed by Deloitte,” explained one first-year historian while waiting for the lifts to function for the third consecutive day.
The lifts themselves have become central figures within Astor life. Rarely operational and universally feared, they operate according to principles still poorly understood by modern physics. Residents report routinely waiting upwards of twenty minutes before ultimately accepting permanent residency on whichever floor they happen to occupy.
One student living on the seventh floor described developing “Olympic-level cardiovascular endurance” after repeated lift failures during Fresher’s Week.
Yet the lifts are not Astor’s greatest infrastructural achievement.
That distinction belongs to the recurring hallway floods of what multiple residents and one deeply traumatised cleaner confirmed was raw sewage.
Witnesses described entire corridors submerged in suspicious brown water during several incidents this academic year, transforming the accommodation into what one resident described as “like Venice, but if everyone there studied Economics”.
The smell, according to residents, never truly leaves.
Astor appears to contain several permanent “mystery odours” which migrate unpredictably throughout the building regardless of weather conditions, ventilation, or apparent biological possibility. Students report notes of:
• wet carpet
• industrial bleach
• burning plastic
• bin juice
• something medically concerning
• and, on one occasion, “a sort of warm ham”
Equally infamous is Astor’s internal climate system, which maintains the building at approximately “active volcano” level year-round. Residents report sleeping with windows fully open throughout winter while paying London energy prices for the privilege of being slowly braised alive.
“You wake up dehydrated like a Victorian tuberculosis patient,” explained one resident. “I genuinely think the building is trying to cook us.”
The water situation has similarly deteriorated. Showers reportedly fluctuate between glacial meltwater and temperatures capable of removing several layers of skin. Entire floors periodically lose access to hot water altogether, producing scenes that residents compared to “a refugee crisis if everyone owns an air fryer”.
Despite these conditions, security enforcement within Astor remains astonishingly efficient.
Residents describe a regime of constant surveillance bordering on psychological experimentation. Guests are scrutinised with the intensity of international border crossings. “I had to explain why my own flatmate was not, in fact, visiting me, but lived in the building too” recalled a politics student. “Meanwhile the ceiling was actively leaking on the security guy’s head.”
Others reported being reprimanded for noise levels during flat pre-drinks despite construction sounds, plumbing catastrophes, and occasional screaming from the lifts routinely echoing through the building at all hours.
UCL Accommodation Services declined to comment, though a representative did confirm plans to install an additional motivational poster near reception.
At the time of publication, the frozen chicken breast remained in the kitchen.
The article appeared in CG98.