Relax, socialise and ‘get away from it all’: new SU Living Room to open in centre of campus

By Zoë Crowther, Students’ Union Correspondent

The Bristol SU Living Room shall include games, entertainment and a comfortable space for students to spend time between lectures, eat their own food and escape from study.

The room shall be opened on Monday 3 December on the fourth floor of Senate House and will be open 8am – 10pm Monday to Friday. Official plans for the Living Room have been in progress since March, with development work beginning in October.

Epigram spoke to Stanford, Union Affairs Officer, who has been involved in the project from the start. He sees the Living Room as a way of ‘bringing the SU to the centre of campus.’ He described the project as ‘loads of little rooms in a big room’ with different zones, including areas for computer games, screenings, table football and ping pong.

Students shall be 'taking over' an area on campus which originally used to be a common room space for the Vice Chancellor. There will also be a student kitchen on the fourth floor of Senate House next to the study centre, complete with microwaves, hot water taps and cupboards for storage.

According to research by the Bristol SU and the University of Bristol, 35 per cent of students rarely or never feel relaxed. Findings also showed that almost 25 per cent report feelings of isolation. This room shall be part of a University-wide push to improve student wellbeing and support the idea that campus can provide leisure and relaxation as well as academic resources.

Bristol SU shall be promoting the Living Room as a 'social hub' rather than a communal study area. Stanford commented that ‘it’s programmed to be somewhere that isn’t for study or for teaching. It’s designed to be a space for getting away from that.’

Asked about the origins of the idea, Stanford emphasised that students had fed into the project in the early stages:

‘It came from a lot of different places. It organically came to be almost by chance. A lot of people started to arrive at a similar point at a similar time within the organisation.’

Similar projects have been undertaken elsewhere, such as by organisations like Camorados, which sets up public living rooms in hospitals, libraries and jails to provide a ‘comfortable place where anyone can come, on good days and bad, to be around people, make connections and enjoy being out of the house.’ Bristol SU spoke to Camorados to find out how these spaces have been used by other organisations and how best to adapt them to the student demographic.

Societies, clubs and networks will be free to use the space, but there shall be no official booking system for the room. The Living Room shall be free for all students to use within the opening hours and is part of a long-term plan to transform Senate House into a student hub.

‘It’s a lot about starting to bring the SU into the centre of campus,’ said Stanford. ‘Senate House is now going forward and it shall never go back to what it once was, which was this bastion of bureaucratic leadership. It’s moving away from that and this is the start of that process.

‘Go to the space, feed back on what you want the space to be. We want to curate the space and give it to students to be something they can make use of as they wish.’

Featured Image: Bristol SU