I stayed in Philharmonic (1st year) and Mulberry (2nd year).
Philharmonic is all 1st years which makes for good nights out but can also make for some really bad nights in when you're trying to catch some sleep and there are pissed people outside singing or people in the room below having 'fun times' shall we say. Also, we had quite a few fire alarm incidents whereby we had to get up and stand outside in the cold at 2am in the morning because people were cooking and burning stuff.
Each flat has a senior student (3rd year) to resolve any problems which inevitably arise e.g. dirty kitchen/bathroom etc, they also help you in other ways like telling you directions to important places (the Guild etc). Some of the senior students have a superiority complex. Philharmonic itself is basic and the rooms are an adequate size - although one thing that I didn't like was the fact that my walls were breeze blocks painted in white - it looked like a prison cell
. We also had mice in Philharmonic and we were on the top floor so God knows what it was like on the ground floor.
Basically, don't expect The Ritz - it's not the best accommodation but it's certainly not the worst. There are onsite washing machines/dryers and a porters office to collect mail. Unfortunately, if you want to hoover you room you have to walk to the Porters office and give them a deposit (about £1) and then drag a 'Henry Hoover' all the way back to your flat - which is irratating especially when you live on the top floor (as I did!!). But it's a gated community so it's not like you're walking past Tesco's dragging a Henry Hoover. Still, it's a bit hard to look cool when you see a course mate and you're dragging a hoover and a load of washing. They also decided to change the hinges on our doors midway through term. I came back after a lecture to find workmen in my room and my door missing. Came back later and I had a new hinge and a load of woodshavings on my floor. It happened to everyone in my flat.
Mulberry was a whole other story - it's a mixture of 2nd/3rd years and people doing MAs. Most of the people in Mulberry are international students. It's not party central. Mulberry accommodation is split in to a block of flats beside the gym and a set of houses tucked away on Mulberry Street. If you're put in the houses you aren't in a gated community and your washing machines are over the road within the other bit where you can also collect mail (by the uni gym) - but it's not too far.
I had quite a lot of problems in Mulberry - for example our boiler constantly broke and leaked brown water all over the worksurfaces and onto the floor. It stank to high heaven and we couldn't use the warm water for much of the time. Also, the fridge leaked. A couple of people in my house kept wedging the back door open with a chair so
anyone could come in - when I was in lectures there was nothing I could do about it.
Other houses did this too and people had laptops stolen because of it. There were 2 bathrooms for 7 of us - 1 on the bottom floor and one on the middle floor but the one on the middle floor only had a bath, no shower and the toilet was in a seperate room. So basically, 7 people were using one bathroom on the bottom floor. The bathroom was disgusting - the shower head fell off and no one fixed it for 2 weeks, the floor was contantly soaking wet and the walls were peeling.
Also, there was building work directly outside - very loud drilling. No one notified us prior and it went on for 3 months. The drilling started at 8am. They also do room checks and I found it quite annoying when the woman told me I couldn't have a kettle in my room - but I wasn't putting in dowstairs were there were rats and a leaking boiler. Oh and when the boiler was being fixed they sent workmen to bleed the radiators in our rooms and they gave them keys for the rooms incase we weren't in -
without notifiying us. I was awoken at 9am by a man in my room. Funny in hinsight but I was livid at the time.
There is also a club/bar directly outside Mulberry and the room windows are only single pane glass (which makes it freezing in winter - especially when they place the beds next to the window and the boiler doesn't work!) - so you can hear pissed people shouting and screaming in the early hours.
There are rats - I saw quite a few outside the front door and the porters/cleaners were aware of it. When the builders were drilling I saw one of them kill one with a metal tube.
There were bugs in the bathrooms - I don't know if they were cockroaches but they were brown and had 'pincey' things sticking out of their heads.
Basically, unless you have very little money, I wouldn't bother with Mulberry - it was grim. Philharmonic isn't much better but at least you can have a laugh with 1st years to take your mind off it - in Mulberry it's just dead.