Student Only Cathedral Point

After two years here, I’ve renewed my lease for another term. The staff have been friendly and helpful, including when I reported a bug. They came early in the morning to remove it and spray insecticide, which I appreciated. It’s only a three-minute walk to the train station, though rooms nearer the station can be noisy. I’ve enjoyed living here despite that. One improvement would be adding in-unit washers to Building A, as Building C has.

The rules around visitors make holidays feel lonely. Guests can’t stay more than three nights, and everyone has to be signed in with a photo. My elderly grandfather just needed to use the toilet, but they wouldn’t let him in for five minutes without signing him in. They also keep hounding you to say how long you’ll be away over the holidays. The trains are incredibly loud and shake the apartment, with no warning about that. The Wi-Fi constantly disconnects and takes five minutes to come back. There isn’t enough fridge space for eight people, so it’s unliveable. On the fourth floor, the tiny window gap does nothing, and the vents bring in no air. The elevator in block B smells like someone threw up in it. They sprinkled something on the carpet and left it there, but the smell has got worse, and nobody seems to acknowledge or care. Staff are rude, and maintenance takes two working days just to read messages, then doesn’t even fix things properly. For what I pay, it’s ridiculous. Stay somewhere else or at your uni, especially for this price.

The rooms get far too hot because the windows barely open, while the staff have air conditioning downstairs. Tip for residents: a cheap key jiggler from Amazon can unlock the window locks. You can also unscrew the safety catch to make the window open fully.

I lived there in 2022-2023 in a gold studio with my partner. Our room regularly hit 25 degrees in summer, sometimes 30, because the windows barely opened. It took more than three months of back-and-forth calls with head office and the company director to get a window key, and only after we signed a declaration. Even then, it opened about four extra inches, so the room was still uncomfortably hot. Environmental health got involved near the end and said they had received lots of complaints from occupants, which cathedral point thoroughly denied. The heat and the staff’s lack of empathy really affected both our mental health. They’d installed an air conditioning unit downstairs for their office, but not in our room, and the windows didn’t open far enough for the tube to fit through. My advice is not to live there.