I'm not sure whether there's a special forum for questions like these, and maybe some people are sick of answering them, so I apologise for both cases.
I'm doing German and ab initio russian at uni, but I want a course that isn't literature based (so that rules most major red bricks, like Bristol, Durham, etc. Also if you are at these unis, I don't wish to start a debate on whether they are literature based or not. I have done my own research, and they are not really what I'm interested in). Anyway, I've narrowed it down to Bath and Sheffield.
Now, Sheffield is supposed to be one of the best departments for Russian, and when I went to the open day, I did really like the languages school as a whole (it was the major open day, I have the department one in a couple of weeks). But I wasn't really keen on the uni as a whole, I'm really after a campus uni, and the accommodation was pretty awful, and generally I wasn't impressed.
Bath, on the other hand is the opposite. I love the atmosphere of the uni and think I'd be very happy there. And the course includes a lot of European Studies, which is something that interests me, as well as a lot of history and politics, on an equal weighting with culture. However I am mildly concerned with the actual language teaching, as I have some reports that it's not exactly great, particularly in Russian (although the tutor I met seemed very patient, which would be a good quality to have in someone teaching you the crazy language that is Russian). I'm also a bit miffed that it doesn't have the breadth of fun related languages like Dutch and Polish to take modules in, and I'm worried that as it's not as well known as Sheffield, people may dismiss it as a rubbish uni.
At the moment, Bath is winning, but I want to have other people's views on what I should do.