News

Wide support for University of Durham College accommodation plans

(20 April 2004)

The long-planned expansion of College accommodation at the University of Durham has taken a step closer with the strong support of Durham City Council.

The Council have endorsed the university's £35.5 million accommodation plans which will add a total of 1000 student rooms in the City. Final planning application approval for the new College residences at Howlands Farm is now awaited from the Government Office for the North East.

Durham’s 16th college, which does not yet have a name, will be for undergraduates. It will be part of the Howlands site off South Road, Durham, alongside student housing for Ustinov College, the exclusively postgraduate college.

The bold and sensitive designs created by architects Gotch, Saunders & Surridge will enable the buildings to blend in with the surrounding landscape. Features include special bricks and sloping green roofs for parts of the college complex, covered with carefully selected slow-growing plants.

The new college will be a self-catering community, like the university’s two most recent colleges, George Stephenson and John Snow at its Queen’s Campus in Stockton which accommodate over 500 residential students.

Professor Tim Burt, Dean of Colleges and Student Support said:” The traditional Durham colleges have large shared dining facilities serving three meals a day, but an increasing number of applicants are attracted to the self-catering option, and the new college design will increase choice”.

Due for completion in 2006, the new developments will ensure that the majority of students will reside in university accommodation.

Other buildings in the total package are more rooms for Ustinov College at Howlands, and a new accommodation complex to replace a 1960s structure at Parson’s Field, off Old Elvet, which will be used by St Cuthbert’s Society.

Further information: Jan Cawood, Public Relations Officer, University of Durham 0191 3340018

Notes to Editors

1. The University has expanded student numbers over the past 15 years in line with the policies of successive governments, and although it has already built about 1000 extra rooms during the same period, the number of students who live out of college in rented housing has increased. The new building programme will reverse that trend.

2. GSS are a Northamptonshire firm, which has been established for more than 120 years, has designed many buildings in the university sector, including projects for the Open University, Cranfield University, Oxford Brookes and University College, Northampton. Other current commissions for halls of residence are at Oxford Brookes and the University of the West of England.

3. Durham is a Collegiate University. All Durham students become a member of one of the 15 Colleges and Societies. Unlike Oxbridge Colleges, Durham Colleges are not teaching bodies, neither, unlike halls of residence, are they purely residential. They ensure students belong, from day one, to a small, tightly knit community; have the opportunity to live alongside a wide cross section of people including undergraduates, postgraduates and staff; have access to many societies and opportunities to get involved; have a college tutor who will take a personal interest in a student’s academic progress and welfare. The last College to be founded in Durham City was Collingwood in 1972.