Photo by Haris Malekos

How would you feel if you were a first-year student right now?

“I would feel fucked. I would feel so fucked.”

That’s what a graduating student told me about the upcoming move to the new LCC building.

This move, ever since the project launched in 2013, has generated a fair bit of backlash, the latest being the protests regarding the closure of Darkroom Bar. But do people really understand the scale of the whole story? Are students and faculty truly aware of the move’s impact on their respective experiences?

This is what I set out to find.

One of the main concerns, shared by both students and faculty, is how the move to a smaller space will impact the workflow in classrooms and in the workshop areas. Even in the current building, students find it difficult to attend workshops due to limited space and availability. As one graduating student remarked:

“There were multiple times where I would get an induction to a printing process or something, and then it would be canceled last minute, or like something would go wrong, and it was always fully booked, which is really annoying, which kind of put me off doing that.”

Also commenting on the issue, a member of the academic staff had this to say:

“I know that the new building is smaller than the current one, and that was an unwelcome surprise, as there are already difficulties in accessing rooms and resources.

Combined with the continuous pressure to recruit ever larger class sizes, I can see the student experience dwindling. Less teaching time and resources will lead to a degraded quality of student experience and outputs – which will of course be deflected onto course teams who will be blamed for the poorer performance that less teaching time inevitably brings.”

In response, a UAL spokesperson said:

“LCC’s new building has been designed with student and staff experience at its centre. Over 600 members of our community have taken part in consultation workshops, and their contributions have directly informed decisions about all kinds of spaces, from teaching and technical to social and student-led. 

The new building is larger than the current one and will positively transform College life. Each space within it has been carefully designed to meet the needs of our staff and students.”

Setting the issue of the building size aside, one thing that kept coming up in the conversations I had with students and staff seems to be a lack of clarity and communication on UAL’s part. When I broached the subject with a technician, they said:

“The biggest problem is, I don’t know what direction LCC is taking; no one tells us.

There are lots of rumors, but we’ve only got rumors to go by. Because it kept changing. I mean, right at the very beginning, we were told by a head of technical that we are taking everything with us to the new building. We were told categorically that “No, no everyone’s jobs are safe, and we’re taking all the kit” … all the technicians, we were all told that in a meeting, we were all there. And little by little, that’s been chipped away.”

Responding to these comments, a UAL spokesperson had the following to say:

“Outside of consultation, we have been working hard to ensure staff and students are updated on the project, and we regularly seek feedback from our community. Once we are in the new building, it will be a priority to review how the spaces are working for students and staff and make improvements where needed.”

This story is still ongoing, and there is still so much more that needs to be, and will be, addressed in future additions to this article. However, for now, this statement from a first-year student talking about the move seems like a fitting conclusion:

“I think it’s kind of inevitable, but it’s important to keep talking about it. And I think a lot of people are gonna talk about it in that way, like they don’t really care or it’s not really their business, but it’s still our university, and we have a say, I think, in how the education that we pay for serves us.”