A new centre of gravity
A sports stadium. A student venue with a capacity of 1500. Another lake, one that it is clean and safe to swim in. An internal university transit bus system. A swimming pool. A conference centre, complete with health spa. Now that the plans for Heslington East have been approved, we can say without a doubt that the University of York is going to be a drastically different and exciting place indeed for those who come after us.
The central questions that need asking, now that permission has been granted and diggers can theoretically move in any day, are of the execution of these exciting and ambitious ideas. Turning plans into reality, sadly, is always far more difficult than making them. How will the lake be kept clean? How will the transit system be funded? If bars on campus that cater for scant hundreds of students are on the brink of financial collapse, how will a venue that caters for more than a thousand be made viable? How will the new colleges be germinated? All these are questions that will need to be answered, and answered satisfactorily, before the new development can even leave the planning stage.
Anyone who takes the time to read the master plan for the new development, which is available for public viewing in the Humanities reading room in the library, will find a document filled with entrancing development jargon and not a vast amount else. The new campus will have a “spine” and feature several “nodules of activity”; the adjustment will require a rethinking of the University’s “centre of gravity”. All very well and good, but if such niceties are not backed up with practical reasoning, they mean nothing. If you will forgive the metaphor, a spine is nothing without backbone. Campus West, as we will probably have to get used to calling it, is in danger of stagnation if all attention is turned eastwards.
The management of this university, in convincing the Public Enquiry that the Heslington East development has enough merit to allow an exception to the Green Belt rules, has proven it is capable of thinking very big indeed. It must now prove that it can turn those ideas into solid, practical realities. All we can do now is await the results with bated breath.
