Around the same time that student occupations convulsed universities across the country, a tall building in the centre of London was given planning permission. The Quill will be close to the Shard and is a fairly typical new London tower, a lumpen glass extrusion full of clumsy symbolism – the titular flurry of steel spikes is apparently "inspired by the literary heritage of Southwark" – but the function was equally symptomatic. The Quill is intended to be neither a corporate headquarters nor "luxury flats", but a halls of residence, for students of King's College.
The reason why we should care about the Quill is because it reveals part of the background to the student rage that has been in the news the past few weeks. It's an extremely prominent example of something which, until now, has been hiding in plain sight; that, for the first time, city skylines are heavily defined by student housing, and that it is architecturally of the very lowest quality. In some cities, the tallest buildings of all are halls of residence, and given that students are a somewhat more reliable market than those elusive young professionals, and also that cash-strapped universities will be flogging every scrap of real estate they own to stay in the black, there's going to be a lot more of them in the next few years.
During the Blair-era building boom, student housing usually took up the slack in less affluent cities. In Manchester and London tall student towers were crowded out by far more lucrative competitors, but in Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool they were frequently the most prominent new monuments – and the most visible proof of the privatisation of education. Developers emerged with typically aspirational names, such as Unite, Liberty Living and Derwent Living, solely catering to students and soon replacing the earlier, subsidised, college-run halls of residence with junior yuppiedromes.
Universities were under constant pressure to sell off land and this had tragicomic consequences – in 2009 Leeds University demolished halls of residence that were built as an integral part of a campus that would soon be listed, while at the same time the Sky Plaza complex was finished by developers Unite, a wildly overpriced series of gated blocks that included the tallest student housing block in the world. The gating is a reminder of the appeal of these blocks – they wall off the student from a potentially hostile city. They're cloisters in concrete and anodised aluminium, appealing to middle-class parents worried about their unworldly progeny.
Some of these places do give a deceptive look of luxury to the student "lifestyle", hiding a reality of crippling debt and grim part-time (and often full-time) work combined with full-time study. In Nottingham, for instance, formerly shiny new blocks advertise that each cupboard-sized room will have a plasma screen, next to dilapidated council estates – intensifying any perceptions of a town v gown divide. A handful of these blocks genuinely are opulent, aimed at the elite students that may eventually be the only students; Nido Spitalfields, London's tallest, is adjacent to and almost indistinguishable from the City of London's new towers, and charges a staggering £1,250 a month for what it calls, with unexpected honesty, "cubes".
Yet, for the most part, this look of luxury is extremely deceptive.
Blocks such as Grand Central, next to Liverpool Lime Street station, are as banal and crushingly oppressive as the worst prefabricated prole-stackers. Unite is especially keen on prefabrication, using the sort of low-cost, modular panel construction methods that were frequently used in the more controversial 1960s tower blocks.
These blocks are a reminder of how students are at the vanguard of exploitation today, with even their housing preparing them for an indentured life. So there's a vivid contrast between the closed, segregated, high-security, high-rent accommodation that students are encouraged to occupy, and the university occupations, with their communality and open spaces. If the new student housing is the epitome of our privatised cities, then students have set themselves the task of finding alternatives.