UCL to spend £1.25bn constructing Olympic Park campus

UCL is set to spend £1.25bn on constructing a new campus in Stratford, East London, where the 2012 Olympic Village had been. Some of the money will also be used for rebuilding existing facilities on Bloomsbury Campus.

To part-fund the project, UCL has signed a £280m loan with The European Investment Bank- the biggest loan ever taken by a British University- the money being lent over a 30 year period.

The site of the old Olympic Village will become the new UCL Stratford Campus

Over half of the money (£740m) will be used to used to upgrade the facilities on the Bloomsbury Campus, including refurbishment of the Bartlett School of Architecture and the construction of a new student centre adjacent to the Bloomsbury Theatre.

The new 11 acre Stratford Campus, the biggest construction project that UCL has taken in its nearly 200 year history, will vastly increase the size of UCL, providing 50,000 square metres for new facilities. UCL Provost, Michael Arthur said the project “gives us something we haven’t had for a long time – which is spare land and spare space.”

Some of the money will be used to update and renovate facilities on the Bloomsbury Campus

Other London Universities have undertaken their own construction projects- Imperial College London are developing a new site in West London and King’s College London plan to take over the BBC’s previous site at Bush House.

UCL’s ambitious plans have been paid for by the increasing number of international students, whose fees are double that of UK and EU students and will soon make up half of UCL’s student population– rising from 24,000 to 35,000 in the last 7 years. UCL is expecting to earn £4.6bn per annum from overseas students by the 2017/2018 academic year.

The first facilities on the Stratford campus are set to open in 2019.