As the Darkroom Bar faces closure, students are pushing back against what they see as the corporatisation of university life.
Growing up, play arrives almost automatically. School ends and you spill outwards – into parks, onto pavements, knocking on friends’ doors without needing a reason.
It becomes instinctive, a way of decompressing after a day spent colouring inside the lines, sitting through double science on grey Wednesday afternoons, or staying late to finish art coursework that never really felt finished.
That rhythm doesn’t disappear with age; it just changes form. The park becomes the pub, the sleepover becomes the bar after lectures. University carries its own rituals of exhaustion: workshops, deadlines, crits that bleed into evenings, and with them, the same need to switch off somewhere alongside others.
But what happens when those spaces begin to disappear? When the routine of going out, of staying out, of existing around other people without purpose, becomes harder to access at the exact moment it feels most necessary?
In 2013, plans for the new London College of Communication building were set in motion. By 2018, they had been approved. In 2022, construction began – on paper, this reads like progress. But somewhere in between the plans and prospect of a shiny new building and state-of-the-art facilities, the community has eroded.
The Darkroom, LCC’s student-run bar, is the main victim of this. Its closure in the move to the new building marks not just an ending, but a shift towards something easier to be in but harder to be a part of.
For a college with communication in its name, the whole process has felt notably one-sided. Zain Cowan, LCC’s sabbatical officer and petition starter for the ‘Save the Darkroom bar’ appeal, explained that the issue lies in the lack of transparency given by the university.
Gaining over 1,100 signatures to date, there is no question that students care. That sense of loss has already moved beyond frustration and into action.
On March 10, students and staff marched from the Darkroom Bar to UAL’s offices, demanding to speak with Interim Provost Steve Cross. Handmade signs carried through LCC’s campus read: “Steve, we are cross with you” and “No Darkroom, no peace”.
The language of the protest was telling: students weren’t only defending a bar, but the kinds of informal environments they feel are steadily disappearing across the university altogether. So why is UAL so set on erasing this pillar of the community, in an institution where collaboration is so vital?
Back in 2013, when initial plans for the new building were put in place, the Darkroom Bar wasn’t benefiting UAL financially, nor was it integral to student life, so in the plans for a new building, the simple choice would be to just scrap it, right?
“I really don’t feel like there’s any sense of community at UAL at all.”
Second-year LCC student
But this was over 13 years ago now, and times have changed, and plans can be retrofitted. If anything, recent developments suggest that both change and adaptation are possible.
UAL’s newest campus refurbishment at the London College of Fashion has made space for a Union Art shop that wasn’t initially considered in its designs, and is evidence of a willingness to change a design when the university feels it is necessary.
For Cowan, the issue isn’t whether individuals within the university care or even the institution’s stakeholders themselves.
There is an obvious recognition of student interests, but he suggests it isn’t always meaningfully reflected in the decision-making. What ends up emerging is a disconnect between the flexibility that the university claims and the rigidity students experience in practice.
That disconnect shows itself most in the moments where communication is supposed to happen. After requesting an interview with Paul Myers, the Director of Change Management at LCC, the enquiry was redirected to UAL’s press office.
What followed, however, wasn’t so much a conversation as a statement from an unattributed ‘UAL spokesperson’ along with a ‘quote’ from Steve Cross, Interim Provost, himself.
It spoke fluently in a familiar script of engagement and inclusion: “600 members of our community had taken part in consultation workshops,” they said, talk of flexible spaces and communities designed into architecture. Cafés, common areas, and student-led ‘zones’, all carefully named and accounted for.
Cross framed the new building as a “real opportunity for the whole student community”, a place where both informal and formal socialising would not just continue but expand.
The change itself told a different story. Where the statement promised openness, the process felt closed, controlled, and mediated. Resistant to interruption.
At a university built on collaboration and empowering individuals to “shape culture, society, and the economy through creativity”, the conversation had felt as though it had already finished and wasn’t open to thought or comment on the matter.
A bar can be replaced on paper. Community cannot.
There’s a similar neatness to this vision of community being presented in the new building. A rooftop bar run by a third-party company, BaxterStorey, had been proposed; however, the sense of commonality that the Darkroom provides is harder to replicate in an environment where its employees have no common ground with its customer base.
A student union-run bar, employing students to give back to its students, is cyclical and self-contained. Handing over to a third-party management only further complicates this.
That same sense of informality also extends to the cost of drinks in the bar — the Darkroom, by design, was accessible. Student space meant student price budgets.
A single spirit of house gin, vodka, or rum with a mixer will only set you back £2.50, and according to The Evening Standard, as of 2023, the average price for a single gin and tonic in Zone 1 was £7.24. You could buy nearly three for the price of one in a pub in the area around the campus.
Accessibility isn’t incidental to community; it’s what allows it to form in the first place. These spaces become meaningful through repetition – familiar faces at the bar, going in between the same 1:00-2:00 pm gap between lectures every Thursday, conversations picked up from the week before that you didn’t manage to finish in time.
Familiarity and community build slowly through quiet acts of rehearsed encounters. All of this shapes how, and if, students feel connected to the places and people around them.
For many at UAL, the feeling of distance already extends beyond the Darkroom itself. “I really don’t feel like there’s any sense of community at UAL at all,” one second-year LCC student explained in the r/UAL Reddit thread.
“Turn up to classes and go home. That’s literally it, just feels like there’s absolutely nothing else to do […] It’s not really an upgrade if they’re getting rid of things,” they explained.
There’s a particular sense of loneliness in moving through a university without anywhere to linger. Without informal places like the buzzing ease of a bar, student life begins to flatten into routine.
What’s really being lost here is difficult to quantify, which is perhaps why it has been so easy to overlook. A bar can be replaced on paper. Community cannot.
Across universities, the language of flexibility, innovation and student experience increasingly masks environments that feel more managed, more branded, and less open to spontaneity.
Informal spaces, the kind that allow for boredom, experimentation, awkwardness, and intimacy, are harder to justify because they resist tangible measurement. Nothing visibly productive happens there. That is precisely the point.
Through overstaying, failed conversations, cheap drinks, embarrassing nights, and friendships that briefly become everything. Through being around other people without needing to explain why.
Community rarely disappears all at once. More often, it fades through small removals, fewer places to linger after class, fewer affordable nights out, fewer opportunities to encounter other people without purpose. Eventually, student life becomes something to move through rather than belong to.
The Darkroom mattered because it interrupted that feeling, however briefly. And its disappearance leaves behind more than an empty space. It leaves behind the question of what kind of university remains when there is less room left to play, to gather, and to exist together.
All images by Haris Malekos