LOUGHBOROUGH

LAVA & FUSION

VENUES, January 2007, COMMENTS

It’s surprising to learn that University of Loughborough is now ranked as sixth overall in The Times’ Top Universities 2007 league - the highest ranking outside of London and Oxbridge. However, the modest sized campus has been quietly racking up a number of gongs for quality of its student experience over the last three years. Most recently, it came first at the Times Higher Awards 2006 in the ‘Best Student Experience’ category following a survey of 6,5000 students from 97 UK universities. Clearly, Loughborough’s student body express a great deal of affection for their campus, and this is due in part to the university’s enormous union building and its staff. Comprising six large venues, including CJs bar, the newly created Lava and Fusion club, the retro Cognito Club, the main Room 1 venue, Piazza and live venue, the union offers Loughborough’s 14,000 students a 3,500 capacity social area of their own.

Andy Parsons, GM of the union, has overseen a stable weekly trade of roughly 8,000 during the last academic year. Much of the draw is due to a successful live music policy. Recent performances by Bloc Party, Pendulum and The Feeling, as well as an expanding student presence, has made Loughborough a popular stop for touring bands. The rest of the nights, including the successful (if not so subtly entitled) Friday Night Disco, benefit from the union’s dominance of the local circuit. The six venues, all uniquely styled, successfully imitate the multi-venue superclub format, by far exceeding the capacity of any other local club.

Within, the management routinely adjust the technological set-up of the whole venue, most recently updating the audio with a site-wide install of Allen & Heath mixing equipment (see p56 for more information). They also operate a policy of annual refurbishment in conjunction with long term design partners GMP and Kribensis Leisure Contracts. GMP’s Neil Morten, whose notable recent designs include the BEDA Award-winning Minibar in Harrogate (owned by Ministry of Sound), has found in his designs for Loughborough an opportunity to indulge his taste for international clubbing styles.

“Neil likes to push boundaries,” says Andy. “He has a thing for exotic designs and jacuzzis. He even wants us to transform our beer garden into an Arabic terrace, with Bedouin tents and hookah pipes. We can’t always match the ambitions of his designs. But who knows? We might let him put a hot tub in our bar one day.”

The Lava and Fusion venue, a large single room on the first floor, was previously two separate venues: a café and a feeder bar to the live venue and Cognito club. Breaking with traditional union operation, Lava and Fusion is a dedicated club. The option of using the space daytime trading was vetoed early on, and Morten stresses the obvious problem of trying to get clubbers to cut a rug in a room where, hours earlier, they were copying up their sports science notes over a coffee.

“The historical obstacle that universities have had is to encourage its students to party in the same location as their education,” argues Neil Morten. “With even more creative design of leisure spaces and added investment on campus, this attitude is fading. Students want an environment where they can have a great time and for value for money.” To cement this policy, the redesign of the venue included a new entrance and staircase from street level to replace the old internal access, which forced the crowds through the corridors of the union’s administrative areas.

“Before the refit the venue was accessed only from the inside,” says Andy. “Which destroyed the venue’s independence as a club. We wanted a big high street entrance rather than have clubbers walk past a bunch of notice boards. So we asked for a huge showy staircase and front door.”

The job was handled in seven days by Kribensis Leisure Contracts, who pulled down an existing fire escape and created the new structure using insulated concrete formwork. The two story staircase is now a glass frontispiece to the building, disclosing a gently glowing interior thanks to the ceiling recessed colour-changing spots in the stairwell. Within, the single venue of Lava and Fusion replaces the two separate bar and café units. Kribensis have pulled down the wall and united the bar and canteen to create a single rectangular bar serving a bright, white-tiled bar and a moody dance floor complete with a brand new stage for acoustic and comedy acts. The venue can also be split for special events using a thick, light-studded partitioning fabric, extending across the space on a rail from its housing. For the interior, Parsons and GMP were careful to avoid cashing in on the latest student fad, and opted in favour of something new.

“We all agreed to go for something that everybody hasn’t seen before,” says Andy. “If you try to copy something that’s already there, already successful, you know that two years down the line it’ll be all over the city centre and your venue will look dated.”

Instead, GMP looked abroad, using a design feature that had proved a great success in Ministry of Sound in Singapore: a vast installation of three dimensional panels wrapped around the interior surrounding the dancefloor. Created from fire-rated PVC and frosted Pespex, the panels have been back lit by a combination of LEDs and neon lighting from 0502, who also collaborated with Morten at Ministry’s Minibar concept in Harrogate.

“The three dimensional feature wall system used throughout we first piloted at the Ministry of Sound in Singapore,” explains Morten. “The wall is backlit with colour changing LEDs, as well as illuminating it traditionally from the front. The end result is an ever-changing dramatic effect.”

Morten believes that Loughborough’s policy of high impact, annual renewal - as well as the provision of dedicated, well defined venues in place of the multi-purpose format - may well inform student venue designs in the future, as the competitive pressure from the high street increases.

“Universities now need to spend money on the things that tick more of the boxes the student requires to go to that seat of learning,” concludes Morten. “Some, like Loughborough have been doing this for years, but it’s important now that more Universities invest into their leisure spaces as the competition from the high street further intensifies.”

Words: Leo Batchelor

Images: Jim Ellam

From: January 2007 Issue

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