supperware.net » writings » you have three minutes to read this article, from the very second I close the door

Last week’s disturbing exposition, that the populace of University are turning into poorly-scripted characters from an Antipodean soap opera, was received with critical acclaim. At least, this is how I interpret the heartfelt advice from one correspondent that I should seek counselling. Yet still, the closer you look at things on campus, the more life can be seen to imitate art.

I’ve been on campus for far too long. Long enough to remember when the Duke of Kent building was nothing but a big square patch of gravel with a minibus parked on it. How slow-witted people can be when the changes around them are so gradual! It’s taken me almost six years to put two and two together, and to take a different look at the architecture of recent years. The Duke of Kent building is uncompromisingly ‘industrial’ from behind, with its metal cladding, plate glass, and exposed ducting. From the front, though, it’s a different story. Its sweeping three-dimensional curve, and its narrow, striated windows. It indicates ‘future’, whilst also conveying ‘maritime’. So, why do we have a building shaped like a ship over forty miles from the nearest port?

Hold that thought. Now, think about the many twisting passages, awkward angles, footbridges and narrow stairways scattered about this campus. Consider the lack of any central meeting point or focus. Now, let your eyes drift across the lake to that geodesic sphere. Have you got it yet? Oh come on! Frenetic shots of Richard O’Brien running about in an aircraft hangar in tights and faux leopard-skin jacket. Nylon-clad contestants in hot pursuit. The Future. The Ocean. The Industrial Zone. How blind can we be? The Millennium House building isn’t imitating a train at all! The sloping facades are supposed to parody the Aztec pyramids. The whole shape is long and thin only because two hundred and three people have to live there — for now. Guildford Cathedral is a producer’s dream of the Medieval zone. Long before the television programme started, they were turning Stag Hill into a Crystal Maze theme park.

No, hear me out. This one’s brilliant. The University could make a fortune. Even more than they are making already. That construction work on the new Management building is just a feasibility survey. The builders are actually contestants in the midst of a two-year mystery game. They have just a few months left to finish the building and fitting-out before they get bricked in. Unfortunately for the theme park, they were given the wrong plans, and the lorry-loads of glass and bricks which were supposed to make the park’s centrepiece — a giant glass icosahedron revolving on a hundred-metre pedestal — ended up as the School of Management building instead. Still, it could have been worse. It could have been allocated to the School of Arts.

The University is excellently placed to be a theme park, with good transport links to the M25, London, Gatwick and Heathrow (when SWT haven’t closed the station). The Vice Chancellor has planned to make a fast buck the moment we disappear round the corner to Manor Farm, and turn the existing campus into a theme park: hence the ‘2020 Vision’ thing. We’ve already got an excellent Lego World on the go thanks to the architectural prowess of the Sixties and Seventies. Now they’ve started building more cuboids in the areas they missed at the West end of campus. And to cap it all, they’re turning our bars into fast-food outlets.

Most students won’t remember this, but when they intially proposed the Oak House complex, the artist’s impressions weren’t populated by students. They were full of thin people in shirts, sitting at airy tables with laptops and glasses of water. You could see them mouthing the words ‘Vision!’, ‘Future!’, and ‘Surrey!’. This isn’t quite what we got. Before the bulldozers moved in, we had the Hall Bar: a dingy brown pub with red upholstered stools and tacky framed Tia Maria posters on the wall. For less than two pounds, you could grab something called a ‘curry’ which, in today’s political climate, would cause UN weapons inspectors to storm in and raid the kitchen.

I was once informed that the difference between a pub and a bar is a carpet. The Hall Bar had a carpet. Roots does not. In fact Roots, by comparison, is anodyne, noisy, and considerably more expensive. In every other way, it’s an improvement, but don’t be fooled. It’s only a matter of time before the rich Americans start arriving, the servings get even more expensive, and we’re not allowed to eat there any more. Then they could fit quite a nifty little indoor rollercoaster in AP1-4, and tourists will queue right down the corridor without being rained on. At last, the University could make millions without having to pretend that it’s actually here for any other reason.

An advantage of these changes is that there’ll be a sudden huge demand for stewards to check tickets, to run the funfair rides, to sell hot dogs, and to mop up any sick. Lose no more sleep, Arts graduates! The University has detailed plans for you after all! And they don’t just involve winning the Sabbatical elections!

In spite of the enormous influx of tourism, it’s quite likely that the local residents will continue their reactionary wont, and will just say ‘No’ to everything. Do you ever see stalls on the High Street asking people to say ‘yes’ to something? Fox hunting? Incinerators? Sabre-rattling in the Middle East? Plans to knock down The Drink and replace it with something even more brutally vulgar? All such plans are relentlessly sniffed out and opposed, or have already been exterminated.

The Guildfordian suspicion of change, which has kept the town tidy, peaceful, and pleasantly bourgeois, can cut both ways. It is why drivers can’t find anywhere to park after 8am, why we don’t have a supermarket that is open 24 hours a day, and why there is more than a bare minimum of green space left on campus when there’s acres of land that the University owns just down the road. In spite of having hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic visitors to the Crystal Maze / Lego theme park every year, Guildford shall remain a town where you won’t be able to buy a portion of chips, a kebab from a van, or anything for that matter, after 11pm. Perhaps the theme park will go the same way as the Slyfield incinerator. Who knows.

So, before you get carried away by the fabulous future of our Stag Hill campus, take some valuable advice from the computerised station announcer. ‘Guildford. This is Guildford.’

Published in barefacts 1050 • 13 February 2003