This is the building my office, and much of the journalism department is in, taken from the ground floor atrium. It’s one of the newer buildings on the campus, whose architecture covers the last 120-odd years (as does the institution’s history). It’s a fine building, as university buildings go, although it does seem to leak a lot. There’s a glass roof at the top of this atrium, which does make the place light and airy, but also makes it wet and cold. The first floor coffee shop also has leaking skylights. I seem to be doomed to leaking universities – I did my undergraduate degree at the famously damp and mouldy Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
The coffee shop is probably the best feature of this building – it’s university-run, but Starbucks-branded, so the coffee is actually pretty good, much better than the automated dispenser coffee on offer elsewhere on campus. The coffee shop is also very busy because the powers that be decided for some reason that we can’t have common rooms, so the only place to talk to colleagues is in someone’s [shared] office, in an empty classroom, or in the coffee shop, so there’s a constant community of assorted academics hanging out holding meetings and such. There’s also a large television, controlled by the coffee ladies, and usually showing Jeremy Kyle. I’ve learnt a lot about the world from that television set.