UK : East : main uni bar closed down, but £200 000 question mark gets award!

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UK : East : main uni bar closed down, but £200 000 question mark gets award!

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November 24, 2012 at 4:04 pm

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General Lighting

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I feel a bit sorry for the student union, but they should have let all the dance promoters in (not just the “cleaner image”) types and non students as even the more boisterous seeming lot aren’t any more trouble than normal students, and stood up a bit more to the cops/licensing if there were “safety concerns”

Kai Closure – a message from Jonathan and Sam, President and Vice President of UCS Union | UCS Union

and if the uni will spend that money on a giant question mark, surely the question is “is it even worth going to university at all”? :laugh_at:

Waterfront: UCS Question? sculpture gets award recognition – News – Ipswich Star
November 24, 2012 at 4:17 pm

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Itsamagicting

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Nice to see the increased fees are going towards something usefull…
November 24, 2012 at 4:35 pm

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General Lighting

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I’ve been to a few meetings in UCS for some environment groups I am part of and although its a nice building I wouldn’t want to study there. Some of my younger staff graduated from the place (doing some IT courses) and I was dismayed to find that they hadn’t even been taught basic coding skills (to process automatically some text / CSV files). which made me think “WTF do they actually teach folk in uni these days?”

The saddest part of it is the Kai bar was also intended to be training for those students who are taking courses for events management etc. so its closure doesn’t reflect well on the quality of teaching there…

their publicity was rubbish TBH. if there weren’t enough students attending it, why not encourage other young people to use the building?

Now I think having a University in the town is a good thing, even though I am not really the academic type. But at least some of its resources should also be targeted at a wider youth range (from high school age to the early 40s), and students encouraged to mix with this wider age group and venues like this are a good way of doing so..
November 24, 2012 at 7:24 pm

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cheeseweasel

@cheeseweasel

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@Itsamagicting 508111 wrote:

Nice to see the increased fees are going towards something usefull…

Not to mention £100,000 of taxpayers’ money courtesy of the Arts Council and the local council (not that I’m against the Arts Council in principle, but to see them spend so much money on something that basically amounts to corporate branding does somewhat get my goat – I know loads of awesome artists that never get any funding for their work, who could make £100,000 go a lot further than a big fucking punctuation mark). The irony is that this kind of shit is probably taking funding away from their arts graduates who hope to scrape some kind of living from their skills after they leave uni.
November 24, 2012 at 7:38 pm

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General Lighting

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Although I wasn’t expecting to be paid for what I did for the community radio station in the current climate, its horrendous that they have to scrape around for the last penny and run on a shoestring budget when it delivers a lot more to the same area than that poxy scultpture. Recently I’ve been doing the quality control and monitoring from home as I’ve got better kit here and the control room still isn’t built due to lack of budget so the racks are in a open plan office, as is a temporary second studio so of course I get distraction from folk asking me to sort out misbehaving computers and having to explain to them that I am aware of some flaky kit in the studio and the 6dB offset between channels in the desk but we can’t do anything about it until we get more funding.

worse, I’m sure those fucking LEDs and PWM electronic ballast interfere with our band I link (by radiating squarewaves through all the mains wiring) and push the noise floor up (our studios are just a few streets behind all these and then some on other buildings) as the other chaps were saying there was a “unidentified interference source”

@cheeseweasel 508131 wrote:

corporate branding does somewhat get my goat – I know loads of awesome artists that never get any funding for their work, who could make £100,000 go a lot further than a big fucking punctuation mark).

I quite often tell young aspiring artists not to even bother with uni but just spend the money what you would have spent on fees getting the equipment to create stuff, and then get a job in the local call centres or other similar place, as they will only end up back there anyway in 3 years anyway when they find the “streets of London are not paved with gold” (they are shocked to learn I actually lived there and moved to EA because paid work opportunities are better here..)
November 28, 2012 at 7:41 pm

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General Lighting

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More on the kai bar closure there, though it clearly seems they didn’t respond to views of the students or promote it well enough to students or others. It was a silly idea to try and set up what appeared to be a Tesco Value version of a TOWIE style bar anyway, rather than capitalise on the Carribean Club having been shut down around the same time, if they’d got Disruption and Organised Confusion and then the DnB lot on alternative weekends they’d have rammed the place solid.

Joseph Mitchell, 21, a second-year history student at UCS, said: “No one is surprised it’s closing down. When you walk past every night it’s virtually empty.

“They have dug their own grave because of the cuts they’ve made.

“They took away Sky Sports so no one goes in on a Sunday any more. I drink ale but they’ve stopped serving that. The food quality isn’t great too.

“People are going elsewhere because it’s cheaper. It’s a downward cycle they can’t get out of.

“I’m a little sad it’s closing. It’ll be weird not having your own place to go to. We still need somewhere to have our socials.

“But everyone’s fear is that it will become privately owned and someone will come in and make it a fancy wine bar or something.

“We don’t want that. Hopefully it will remain in the hands of the university.”

Claire McAndrew, 23, a third-year sociology and youth studies student, added: “If it was more fun and welcoming I would have gone more. It is not particular inviting. There is no atmosphere.

Ipswich: University
November 28, 2012 at 8:04 pm

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damo666

@damo666

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We tried to get a night down there but they wouldn’t even entertain it which is a shame we generally tend to bring in a good crowd.
Sadly another venue in ipswich close’s because they didn’t wanna try something different.
A friend of mine might be opening a new venue in the new year but the details i have are very vague at the moment, hopefully something comes out of it as the half decent venues are either too expensive or won’t allow our style of music to be played.
November 29, 2012 at 12:22 pm

#960839
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General Lighting

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@damo666 508925 wrote:

We tried to get a night down there but they wouldn’t even entertain it which is a shame we generally tend to bring in a good crowd.
Sadly another venue in ipswich close’s because they didn’t wanna try something different.
A friend of mine might be opening a new venue in the new year but the details i have are very vague at the moment, hopefully something comes out of it as the half decent venues are either too expensive or won’t allow our style of music to be played.

good luck to them – I am willing to help out with any research/info about licensing, getting a good image etc especially since joining Ipswich Community Radio – a lot of local DJ’s/promoters are linked with this station and some of the dance presenters do the breakfast shows/news programmes as well and are willing to have a proper adult debate with the Police / Council about the whole nightlife here.

I have been comparing Ipswich and Felixstowe with Rotterdam and Amsterdam as they are demographically similar, to see why so many events are allowed in NL but less in England. There are of course some cultural differences, but EA is not so different to Holland in many ways.

In either country, whether or not nightlife events are permitted, folk will and do still take hard drugs and drink a lot. And various forms of social conflict are still a risk, Especially in times of economic depression. (I often read 112 Nederland – Het nieuws van nederland and the country clearly has many of the same social problems as the UK), But what the Dutch have done is allowed properly managed, licensed and affordable events as that means at least some money can flow back into the local economy to offset costs, and promoters work with the Council to ensure they are safe. It is not by any means a free for all for drugs, those who do them are expected to consume them discreetly, dealers are still caught and punished (especially young unemployed people trying to deal to as a primary source of income) and its no excuse for anti social behaviour or traffic violations – similar with alcohol. (in fact you really do not want to commit a traffic violation in Holland, its hundreds of euros fines as well as license bans for what we would consider minor stuff!)

there is no reason why we could not have this nightlife on our side of the sea…
December 3, 2012 at 11:06 am

#960840
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General Lighting

@general-lighting

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this was in our local news. It doesn’t surprise me, and reinforces the fact that any “student” venue should cater for a wider age range and non students too – IME most students today especially older ones are self funding and more interested in passing their exams than partying and even if they do want to go out won’t pay prices over the odds..

Poll: More mature students studying at University Campus Suffolk – News – Ipswich Star
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