Читать книгу Class of '79 - Chris Rooke - Страница 18

Notwithstanding the culture shock that I was about to undergo, right from the start I had problems to overcome, the first and main one being my accommodation, or rather the lack of it. Portsmouth Poly was trying hard to develop and upgrade its facilities (and in subsequent years it did a great job), but at the time their facilities were still meagre, especially in terms of halls of residence, of which there was only one. At the time I arrived, there was no real campus, only a selection of old buildings just to the North of Southsea and the pleasure beach, bought up by the then still quite new Polytechnic, and then re-purposed as different departments. There were virtually no purpose built buildings at all.

The History department building was actually an old hotel that had been partially, and hastily converted into a college. The name of the old hotel, somewhat optimistically named King’s Rooms, had been removed from the front of the building, but where the letters had been, they had left an indelible mark on the stone façade and the name could still be quite easily read. Hence the History department building was still known as King’s Rooms. For a start this meant that there were no catering facilities in the department, and as there was no central campus, we would all troop to the café next door when given a break between double lectures.

Apart from this there were a collection of old Victorian houses that formed the administrative blocks, and various other buildings (old schools and the suchlike) that were used by various departments throughout the college, with the Students’ Union being in an old warehouse. The old library (that was finally replaced in my third year with a wonderful new building) was housed in a very unsuitable building, with cramped rooms and poor lighting, which wasn’t great, but even worse was the lack of resources. There were some books that were so in demand, yet of which they had so few copies, that the library operated a short term loan system. Nothing unusual about that you might think, but in our library if a book was marked as being on short term loan it meant that you could only take it out for 4 hours! If you didn’t get your reservation to borrow the book into the library in time, you were stuffed (and sometimes you were anyway as previous borrowers sometimes simply failed to return the book on time).

Fellow students - from later in the course