GM FORECASTS RADICAL CHANGE - The Founder

20 LETTERS Monday 29 January 2007 thefounder
Letters to the Editor
Sir,
It came with disappointment this week when I read of the latest revisions
to the ‘back gate’ opening times. The ‘proposed changes’ [which are less
proposed and more implemented without consultation] see the gate leading
to Spring Rise open later and close earlier. How is this a solution to the
supposed problems the gate is meant to cause?
The gate did open at 05:45 daily and close at 00:45 in the evening. The new
times see the gate open at 06:45 Monday thru Friday while it will close at
23:15 Sunday thru Thursday, and 00:45 on Fridays and Saturdays.
Put the most simple way possible: CLOSING THE GATE IS STUPID AND
DANGEROUS.
The residents complain of ‘a great deal of inconvenience and disturbance’. I
live in Egham; no matter if you shut the gate or not, I will be walking home
through Egham. Some inconsiderate students will insist on being boisterous
when leaving campus and this is disappointing, but locking the gate
isn’t the solution. It won’t stop people being noisy and will only succeed on
making the walk home longer surely creating more noise.
One simple argument for leaving the gate open is this: By diminishing the
opening times of the gate you are doing nothing more than creating a bottleneck.
You are simply going to have a higher concentration of people use
the gate when it is open.
Also, If the gate shuts at 23:15, I will be leaving the bar at 23:00. That’s a
whole hour you’re losing of my custom. Now multiply that by the number
of people who don’t fancy queuing the usual half hour for a drink and the
Union will be loosing even more money. And no, I’m not arriving earlier.
The most pressing and urgent matter is safety. Locking the gate before the
end of student functions at the Union or even Medicine means students
will inevitably walk home down the A30. Inevitably a lot of these students
will be in varying stages of inebriation and this, mixed with a busy A road,
surely isn’t good. By denying the pedestrian friendly route through Egham
the safety of many students is compromised; this from an institution who’s
first and foremost concern in this matter should be the safety of its students.
It shouldn’t be pandering to the unfounded concerns of locals. The
safety argument is also directed at Rob Coveney at the Student’s Union.
His involvement in this issue seems nothing short of weak and lackluster;
Please correct me if I’m wrong. Many student’s live within a reasonable
walking distance from campus and therefore have no need to use the bus
that the Union provides; before that argument is trotted out.
I have a group of friends who live opposite the gate; they have never complained
of noise, disturbance or damage and they are as much residents of
Egham as the locals. I live off Spring Rise and my housemates and I have
also never witnessed any anti social behaviour. However, we cannot deny
that sometimes this can happen. Random security patrols seems a more
appropriate response to this supposed problem. What makes me laugh is
that the busybody residents who insist on furthering the unfounded hatred
of Royal Holloway’s students must not have noticed the 128 year old
college, with its 7000 plus students, when they moved in. Funny that.
Chris Owens. c.owens@rhul.ac.uk
2nd Year Undergrad, Modern History and Politics
thefounder
editor@thefounder.co.uk
An open letter to the SU President and Security Manager,
with a response from the President
Dear Chris,
Thank you very much for your letter regarding the revised opening hours of Spring Rise
gate. I completely understand your position on this issue and on behalf of the students at
Royal Holloway, I have spent three months on this, trying to argue for the gate to stay open.
I feel that your accusation of my involvement in this being weak and lackluster shows a
great misunderstanding in the work that has gone on to try and resolve this issue.
Over the summer, local residents around Spring Rise and Ripely Avenue began to collaborate
in order to try and make their voices heard by the College, as they were being kept up
at night by the minority of students who create noise when leaving the campus. This resulted
in a call for the local council to get involved, and a threat to attempt to revoke licences
that the College and Students’ Union hold to serve alcohol until the times that we do. In the
second week of August the senior management team of the College Facilities Management
Department approached a number of people (including myself) to consult on the opening
hours of the Spring Rise gate. Several suggestions that were close to being won were to
close the gate every single night at 10pm and to close the gate completely, opening it only
in emergencies. Our original proposal was to keep the gate opening hours as they were last
term, but no matter how much we pushed for this to happen, the College did not feel this to
be viable. Having gone through some very difficult negotiations, the best I could get was to
close the gate at 11.15pm from Sunday to Thursday, and to 12.45am on Friday and Saturday
night. Remember also that this is only a trail period. In the near future these opening hours
will be reviewed again, and we will again have the chance to fight on your behalf.
Chris, please don’t feel in any way that I thought that closing the back gate to the College
early was a good idea. As you quite rightly pointed out, there is every possibility that the
early closing of the gate will cause a bottleneck in other parts of Egham. In one meeting,
I suggested to a senior manager that this proposal would not solve the residents’ issue of
complaints, but merely move the issue to another part of Egham, namely the Malt Hill area.
The response to this was ‘yes, but it isn’t the Malt Hill residents that are complaining’.
Safety is also an issue that I brought up in such negotiations. This was knocked down with
a response that said that the A30 route would be safer due to improved lighting and the
presence of CCTV (before you ask, I haven’t got a clue where the CCTV cameras on the
A30 are either). The Non-Res bus argument was, of course also batted my way.
In short, the decision on closing the gate early was not mine to make, but mine to fight.
Fought I did. The outcome wasn’t what I wanted, but it also wasn’t a decision to close the
gate at 10pm every night.
As I outlined in the General Meeting, my colleagues and I worked hard at this on your behalf.
We also don’t think this should be the end of it. If you wish to see the gate open later,
then you must also help us to argue this. Complain to Facilities Management, and give us
a bit more ammunition to go to the College and renegotiate.
Chris, finally I leave you with the closing paragraph of an email that I sent to Facilities
Management senior managers on 21st August 2006, whilst we were arguing for the gate to
stay open. If you still feel that I haven’t tried to fight enough on your behalf, then I suspect
that you have elected the wrong president:
“Although I completely understand that keeping the local residents happy is a direct factor to
the college community as a whole, I must also bare in mind the reason why we all find money
in our bank accounts at the end of the month.....students.”
With kind regards,
Rob Coveney
President
SURHUL