Accomodation

When talking about their time at university everyone has stories about their course and what they did in their spare time but often the most memorable stories are ones about where they lived. From my own experience of university I have observed that your accommodation shapes everything you do, from who your friends are, to where you eat and how you use your free time.

I am therefore intrigued as to how this might have been different in the 1960s. The sixties were a revolutionary time for the colleges of Royal Holloway and Bedford especially considering the introduction of male students in 1965. With this in mind it would be interesting to see how accommodation differed between the Royal Holloway and Bedford colleges but also between the established female students and the new male students. Was there a particular type of accommodation that was more desirable? What was the cost? What were the rules? The exciting opportunity to interview a past student would reveal how their university accommodation made an impact not only on their lives while at college, but also perhaps on later decisions.

The choice to make the project an oral history assignment means that the memories and stories of a past generation of students can be preserved and potentially used for later projects, in particular I think it would be fascinating to discover whether the impacts of accommodation are paralleled in the lives of today’s students.

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