Local Easter Egg Hunt RUINED By CHAOTIC Building Numbering

In an attempt to reach out to the neighbours and inspire some community bonding in what is currently a very quiet Southampton, the University decided to host an Easter egg hunt on Highfield Campus, which would have seen students teaming up with locals to search for hidden eggs around the campus.

The initial plans for the event would have seen each team given a starting point on campus, a place where they would find clues to help them navigate around the buildings. To test the accuracy of the clues, a number of volunteers were asked to take part in a trial run, making sure they led to the correct place. However, after an hour, they ALL came back empty-nested, prompting the cancellation of the event as there was not enough time to rewrite the clues.

Inevitably, this brings us back to the question of “why is nobody doing something about this?”. For those interested in the background story, it has been suggested that the building numbering should be simplified, but the University doesn’t support this.

At the moment, buildings 65, 67 and 68 are in a three-mile triangle, 1 is directly next to 16 and 85 is between 32 and 20! Cessation of this Southampton Quirk was last mooted in 2005 at a meeting of the University Easter Egg Hunt Committee and presented as a recommendation to the Senate. Most departments were supportive, however the Student Welfare Committee had recently invested £8m of staff meeting time in their Get Undergraduate Students Talking, or GUST, initiative, which had the building numbering system at its core.

GUST was designed to alleviate some of the social pressures of coming to University. They recognised that the unique system, which can come to be accepted but never quite understood, was a key factor in the forming of many friendships, especially outside Halls; statistics show that around 30% of friendships were formed as a direct result of students teaming up to decode the campus.

It is still a working system. When new buildings are added, the committee convenes to decide how best to fit it in, so that a genuine reason for its number can be presented, but it still fulfills the GUST ethos. For example, when building 3 was demolished in 2009, the documented reason for it being replaced by building 85, is that 8 minus 5 is 3, and they wanted the three to live on. However, we at The Tab have seen the SWC minutes confirming they and SUSU lobbied the senate for a random number so that new freshers in the building could start conversations about it.

Since 2005, the plans to re-number have remained quietly shelved without much fuss, however, when contacted for comment, the Easter Egg Hunt Committee said:

We are disappointed that the University are continually deferring this decision. Until we have some decisive leadership and action on this issue, it will continue to be a problem. We call on the university to replace the GUST policy with a more modern alternative which is appropriate to the needs of all parties.

What do you think? Should the buildings be re-numbered or should we embrace the unique system we have all learned to love? Let us know in the comments below.

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