[studentinhalls]

Hi

Trust me you do not want to live at the bakery. I am living here now and I am not joking it is terrible.

Firstly it is over priced and the prices go up each year (currently £99 per week). The average rent around here is about £70-80 per week and in Treforest near the uni it's as low as £50 per week. The building is in an awful area called Grangetown which is widely known to be a bad area of Cardiff. It is full of gangs and prostitutes (I know two people who got mugged by the bridge right next to the bakery during freshers week). I also know that one room in block c had a break in this year with the student still in her bed and the security didn't even notice the theives get in. It is right next to the train station which is handy for travel but throughout the day your flat and particuarly your room gets vibration shocks from the trains going past (it's very annoying). The rent is taken at ridiculous times (two out of the three instalments before your student finance goes into your account) so you need to find the money before or they fine you. Most of the washing machines in the laundry room do not work properly and often you will put your clothes in and come back to find that it's stopped half way through leaving your clothes needing to be washed again and it costing you another £2.20. The staff are not helpful when things need fixing (it took them 4 days to fix a curtain that had come off of the rail). The security hand out personal information to other students from the database and are known to be bias towards in particular female students who don't mind giving them some female attention.

It is almost 100% glamorgan students with one or two from uwic or cardiff. It is 25 minutes train journey to the main treforest campus and your yearly rail pass will cost you roughly £580 (33% discount from £900 odd because you're a student). The internet is a major disadvantage here. Not only is it not wifi with a very short ethernet cable to connect your laptop but it is continously extremely slow often not even being able to load a single youtube video within an hour. Although they are saying they are upgrading this for next year that is what they said the previous years.

If you were unlucky enough to get a ground floor room it's even worse. Everyone walks past your living room and bedroom window and can see in and of course everyone looks in out of interest. On the other side the ground floor rooms are just seperated from the road by a small railing. The room that was broken into was on the ground floor on that side. The pictures on the website are debatable. There is a waiting list of 9 or more people wanting to move out (usually there is a waiting list for people wanting to move in with halls) and that's just the people that are actually trying to move out, most other people want to but don't see the point now.

Obviously I have only lived at the bakery but I have also been to the atrium and a few other liberty living residences and it's the same. I have heard that their others throughout the country are similar and friends of mine have made the same complaints.

You really are better off living with halls of another company or private housing.

[arcticsponge]

4yr law degree 2003-07 >> 1st year GC, 2nd Meadow Street, 3rd Raymond Terrace 4th (and finals) Fairoak Road Cardiff.

Having a car is useless - when living in Trefforest I walked everywhere mostly using my car at weekends, once in Cardiff, I got into the bad habit of leaving 30 mins before lectures et al, missed many of them (how did I get that 2:1 ?) had I taken the train I could've waited it out in the LRC (it was in Glyntaff back then).