Kingston Uni pioneers new cheese-roll culture

Feeling peckish? Hungry after a lecture? In need of a meal? As well as its Clown House and Future Ill’s programme, Kingston University is pioneering another ‘sector-leading’ strategy to make its rivals blue and green with envy: quick-bite cheese rolls and ‘transformative’ vending machine drinks to help enhance your Future Skills.

When two scientists recently took a visitor for a coffee in the Picton Room at Kingston University’s Penryhn Road campus, they were surprised and clearly disgusted to find that the popular ground-floor meeting and eating room had been closed. In an announcement quietly slipped out on 27 April, and hardly noticed by staff at first, the Uni suddenly revealed radical changes to KU’s catering and hospitality provision, not just at Penryhn Road but across the whole Uni. The Picton Room was closed the very next day.

While the announcement said that other Pen Road outlets ‘continue to be available for food and refreshments’, the now former Picton Room will be incorporated into the money-gobbling ‘Main Building Transformation Project’, which has left the campus looking more like a permanent building site since the middle of 2023, and is part of the VC’s ‘legacy’ big-build projects he loves to spend millions on. Trying to sound enthusiastic, the message added: ‘To complement the existing catering outlets at Penryhn Road, the Transformation Project will add new vending machines offering quality hot drinks and snacks as well as a kitchen space with microwaves and sinks providing more choice for students’. So that’s alright then. Staff will be able to use super efficient ‘vending machines’ to obtain ‘quality hot drinks and snacks’ for themselves and their guests (such as External Examiners), while students will be able to eagerly cater for their own catering needs with a few microwaves and even some sinks to wash up in.

No doubt all this was sold to the BOG (Board of Governors) at their January meeting as ‘ground-breaking’, ‘sector-leading’ and ‘transformational’, all the usual managerial BS terms so favoured by Steven ‘Two Jobs’ Spier, KU’s Vice-Admiral and a true legend in his own lunchtime. Never mind that serious money was invested in the creation of the Picton Room when it was first opened, and that the local connections to former Black slave Cesar Picton were exploited at length in Uni marketing campaigns. After all, it’s only money.

The Picton was a good alternative to sitting in the main and noisy canteen at Pen Road, and was also a rare space where staff could arrange to greet and meet, relax over a meal or coffee, or arrange to host external visitors. No longer. The message is now, er, ‘hard cheese’. Use a vending machine.

But it gets worse. From 15 April, KU staff found that the Town House cafe at Pen Road now closes at the radically revised time of 6.00pm. Think about that. When it was first opened, the Clown House, which cost over £4m, was proclaimed by Spier and his gang of overpaid Silver Leadership Teamsters as the new ‘jewel in the crown’ of Kingston Uni. Glossy images of the building, shining brightly in the evening, with happy staff and students active and busy on all floors, were a core part of the expensive marketing of the ‘award-winning’ project. The cafe, they said, was a ‘pioneering’ new public space, which would help ‘transform’ the image of the Uni, exemplifying (quote) a ‘refreshing and imaginative design culture’ that would (quote) unite ‘town and gown’ and leave visiting dignitaries in awe.

There was more to come. In more penny-pinching blows, the Knight’s Park Bar will now no longer open on Mondays or Tuesdays during term times. Kingston Hill library cafe will now close at 7pm instead of 8.30pm during term time, and will no longer open outside of term time (which is surely a big and surprising middle-finger to all those Management and Business Studies students who study at the Hill, especially parents and time-challenged part-timers who work in central London and have to commute and juggle their studies carefully). But wait! There’s even more. Kingston Hill Costa/Shop will now close at the earlier time of 4pm on weekdays and no longer be open on Sundays during term time and at weekends non-term time. In other words, staff and students at Kingston Hill, in need of a purchase or essential bite to eat, will now find themselves in the University catering services equivalent of a ghost town campus. No doubt the answer will be yet more lovely ‘vending machines’.

It all makes a mockery of Aramark and ‘Eat Central’, and adds insult to injury by the Uni’s SLT daleks. As Kingston University staff speculate about who will be axed in a new round of redundancies, all these short-sighted ‘economies’ are yet another sign of the deplorable financial mismanagement of the institution overseen by ‘Sir’ Steven ‘Two Jobs’ Spier, Kingston’s Gold Commandant, who is also an expert on Swiss cheeses and the world’s leading architect. It will further demoralize both students and staff. Hunting down some decent food and drink at Kingston Polyversity in the future will be the only ‘Future Skill’ needed. Home-made cheese-roll, anyone?