What are your plans for the café?
We have loads of ideas. The student café should be really cosy, a kind of Starbucks where you can lounge around the whole day long or have a quiet beer after classes. There should be scope for holding drinks parties and handovers of boards there, and we have also talked about pub quizzes and bands that could perform occasionally.’
Will the café be open all day?
‘The café is open all day but we haven’t decided where the emphasis will lie. Do we want to concentrate on the end of the day or will we have activities throughout the day? It is likely to be accessible to students until about 8 o’clock; after that we would be competing with the cafés in the town centre. I think deals have been made about that between the town council and the university.’
Are you going to run the café yourselves?
‘If it is up to us, yes. But it is already clear that the OSP is at the controls. They make sure there are qualified staff and they manage the budget, so it remains to be seen how much freedom we will get. I don’t expect the OSP will leave it all up to us. And that is perfectly understandable, considering they will be held to account by the university if, for instance, they don’t achieve their targets for client-friendliness.’