Cambridge Halls:
Ok, so I'll start with the good of Cambridge Halls.
Living in Cambridge Halls was a very social experience for me; I met a lot of people and went out quite a lot.Cambridge Halls is extremely close to both the MMU campus,City Center and Fallowfield, which is good as it means you can get more sleep and you're never too far from where you want to be.
The magic bus is only £1and it only takes about 15-20 mins to get to Fallow (where a lot of house parties are).
Cambridge Halls has a 24/7 reception, meaning that you can leave your keys there if you're going on a night out and collect them when you come back. There is also 24/7 security and a 24/7 laundrette. The laundrette is really expensive, so you’ll probably only be using it once – I think it’saround £3.50-£4.00 for a wash, which is absolutely horrible. At least theoption to blow all your loan on washing your No Fear clothes is there if youneed it though.
Cambridge Halls does use a key card system to let you in tothe courtyard, however; the gate is almost always permanently open. So it doesn’treally matter whether you are someone who actually lives there or not; anyonecan come in whenever they please.
There is a lot of space in the kitchen to put all your potsand pans, and the fridge is decently sized. There is no tv included in the flat or the rooms, but thereis an Ethernet port in every room and in the kitchen.
Now on to the bad.
Well, let’s start with the rooms and the flats. The roomsare pretty small, which is to be expected really; they are student flats afterall. This would be fine, but a lot of the appliances don’t actually work orhave had faults throughout the year. For example, my flatmate didn’t have anyelectricity in his room for 2 weeks and the radiator in his room was iffy –sometimes it’d work sometimes it wouldn’t. Another problem, which can’t reallybe fixed by the staff, but is a problem nevertheless, is the noise. The wallsare about as useful at keeping out noise as a chocolate fireguard. You can hearliterally everything that goes on around you and when I say everything I reallydo mean everything. Bearing in mind that, if you’re on a middle floor like Iwas, you have people to the left, right, up and down so just imagine what it’slike when everyone goes out on the pull and you have a 9am so you have to stayin. Yeah, exactly.
Don’t be scared by the ‘communal toilets’ thing. It is just one toilet and one shower with locks on the doors, you don’t have to all **** in front of each other. However, the shower was just god-awful from day one. I think I had maybe 3 hot showers. The rest were cold to almost slightly warm. So prepare yourself for spending over £1k for ice cold showers because despite complaining profusely over and over again it was never and probably will never be fixed. At one point, about 5 weeks ago, an email was sent out that stated they’d be looking to fix the plumbing, but that never came to fruition.
If you are as naïve as I was and you think that moving in tohalls is going to be your chance to learn how to cook for yourself and what not think again. The kitchen, at least our kitchen, is one of the worst ****ing things in existence. The cooker broke within the first 3 weeks and we had to wait a few days for a replacement. On top of that, the grill and oven are really strange to use; sometimes it will heat up mega fast and burn your food to a crisp and other times it will take hours to cook anything. Also, if you get put in a flat with people who don’t clean up their ****, like I was, you’rein for a ride.
Good luck to any of the clean freaks out there because you’ll need it.
I was debating whether to include this next bit, but I guess I will because I know for some people this would be a big negative. There is,at least from my experiences, a lot of drug use. Pretty much everyone I know from Cambridge uses drugs, I’m not going to lie. The thing is though, you’re going to get that anywhere. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a Halls that has absolutely no drug use at all. If you get caught using drugs or in the possession of drugs you get called in to a meeting and fined. I’ve not actually seen anyone get kicked out of halls for anything to do with drugs.
All in all, my experiences of Cambridge Halls were ok. It’s in a good location and was pretty social, which is what I wanted from halls. I won’t try to say it’s the best because it wasn’t, and every time there was a holiday or anything like that I was extremely glad to go home. I’d probably give the experiences of halls (the people I met and friends I made, as well as the location) a 7-8/10 whereas the living would be about a 4/10.
Please remember that this is just my experience though. I do know some people who also lived in Cambridge and had really anti-social flatmates and didn’t really make any friends in their flat, which resulted in them having a pretty **** experience. I think this is mostly down to the fact the Cambridge is a ‘flat based’ accommodation rather than a ‘dorm based’accommodation. The wifi is also terribly inconsistent. Have fun with that one.