Southwark Student Living
This 2000 bedrooms world-leading university’s student hall draws inspiration from its historic location as a gateway to the City of London, where travellers and pilgrims once converged in Southwark. Echoing the communal halls of the past, it incorporates dining areas, shared spaces, and modern communal zones designed to foster connection, collaboration, and a strong sense of belonging.
One of the key challenges in student living is balancing privacy with opportunities for connection. Students want their own space, but they also want to be part of a vibrant, social environment.
The response tackles this by introducing a concept of “alone together, together alone,” creating spaces where students can be in the company of others without feeling crowded. The design brings the outside in, with landscaped areas shaping and defining the ground floor.
The natural elements help soften the space, making it feel more like a home than a standard institutional building. Voids and open spaces create natural separations between different parts of the building, allowing students to move easily from one area to another while maintaining a sense of connection to what’s happening around them.
Designed with a focus on community and well-being, it offers a unique blend of privacy and social interaction, where students from around the world can feel both at home and part of something larger.
Stepping into the site feels like entering a lively, welcoming village. The entrance lobby is designed to be a central hub, with a friendly reception area that offers a warm face to greet students each day. Security is subtle, with a focus on comfort rather than formality, creating a space where students can feel safe without feeling watched.
The Ground Floor acts as a transition space between public and private areas, bustling with life and energy. The inclusion of a café and a public staircase invites students to meet, study, or simply relax, activating the space with informal social interactions. The design encourages a blend of students from different parts of the building to come together, whether they live there or are simply visiting. At the heart is its Innovation and Knowledge Hub, a dynamic space that brings together students, staff, and the wider community. This space isn’t just about study; it’s about collaboration and engagement, a place where different ideas and approaches can meet.
From small group study areas to larger seminar rooms, the hub is designed to be flexible, adapting to the needs of the students who use it. The Innovation Hub opens out to the surrounding neighbourhood, creating opportunities for interaction beyond the student body. This community forum offers a platform for civic engagement, allowing discussions and presentations to spill out into the public realm, encouraging a dialogue between the university and the world beyond its walls.
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Dining at the Hall is not confined to a single cafeteria. Instead, the building features triple-stacked dining spaces, designed to be used throughout the day, not just at mealtimes.
The design offers flexibility, with smaller, more intimate areas on the upper floors and larger communal spaces on the lower levels. A market kitchen-style dining concept adds variety and vibrancy to the experience, allowing students to choose from different dining areas that suit their mood—whether they’re looking for a quick bite or a more social meal.
Voids and open spaces between the floors provide visual connections, ensuring students remain part of the larger community even when they’re dining alone.
Designing a student residence for over 2,000 people is no small feat. The challenge lies in making such a large building feel intimate and personal, giving students a place where they can feel both part of a community and secure in their own space. At the Student Village, this has been achieved by breaking the building down into more manageable, human-scale spaces, where large communal areas don’t feel overwhelming but instead create spaces for students to interact, relax, and grow.
A central street runs through the building, acting as a natural meeting point and social hub, while clusters of rooms are arranged around shared spaces, giving each group of students their own micro-community within the larger residence.
The dormers are accessed through a single main entrance, ensuring security while also providing a sense of welcome. This entrance corner, part of many students’ daily journeys, leads into a lively, welcoming space, where the architecture immediately encourages interaction and movement. The layout is simple yet effective, with clear, active routes guiding students through the space.
One of the standout features of the building is The Cloud, an elevated amenity space that stretches across the upper levels of the building. This 85-metre-long space is unique in student living, offering a calm retreat away from the bustle of the city below. With four external garden terraces, each with its own character, The Cloud provides students with green spaces where they can relax, socialise, or even grow their own plants.
