The university with a “campus” in a listed building in Croydon town centre has slipped to a ranking of 100th among the country’s best higher education establishments.
Slipping back: London South Bank University’s ratings have got worse since opening their ‘campus’ in Croydon
When London South Bank University was unveiled in 2019 as the new occupiers of Electric House, on Wellesley Road, close to the Town Hall, they were rated the 95th best university in the UK…
Seems it’s been all downhill from there.
The latest university rankings have been released today as part of The Times and The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2025, just in time for eager students to fill in their application forms this autumn.
Top of the pile this year is LSE – the London School of Economics – beating St Andrews, Oxford and Cambridge for the first time in the guide’s 31-year history.
“Its overall win is due to improved results in graduate prospects, student satisfaction and teaching quality,” the guide says. “It comes third nationally for its research, continuation rate and the proportion of students achieving a first or 2:1.”
Helen Davies, the guide’s editor, acknowledges how influential and important strong universities can be in the fabric of a town or community. “The best universities… are local and global powerhouses of intellectual thought and creativity, from the arts to science, that can power economic regeneration and lead the way to a better life,” she said.
That was at least part of the thinking behind Croydon Council stepping in to bring a further education institute to the town centre, and rejuvenating a long-vacant heritage building, when Jo Negrini (remember her?) skipped off to an international developers’ conference in the south of France in March 2019 for the big reveal of… LSBU.
Not a pancea: LSBU has arrived, amid Croydon town centre’s continuing decay
When they moved into Croydon, South Bank offered degree courses in nursing, accounting, business management and a Masters for chiropractors (quite), with facilities including a lecture theatre, classrooms and a café.
The flourish of promises made at the time by our elected representatives and overpaid council officials are worth recalling now, as other blandishments are made about deeply underwhelming initiatives and stop-gaps, in the absence of the delivery of more substantive solutions.
LSBU was supposed to be part of “a Croydon Creative Campus”, together with the refurbished Fairfield Halls, “which would bring economic growth and more jobs while giving top-class university education opportunities… to all of our residents” the council promised at the time.
Whatever South Bank might have done for Croydon’s fortunes since they opened their doors here (minimal if anything, it would seem), their own performance seems to be on a downward trajectory.
And this at a time when universities across the country are struggling to balance their books, as overseas students – and their juicy fees – have been scared off by the previous Tory government, and savvy British teenagers shop around for the best student deals, and the better universities. Or just opt to go out and get a job.
When Negrini went to the MIPIM conference, South Bank was very much a council sop for their failures to get Westfield to deliver on their town centre promises, after wasting years with a backwards-looking strategy for the town centre, based on out-dated high street retailing and the dubious promises of multi-billion-pound international developers.
There were problems, as we know, elsewhere, too. The Fairfield Halls had not yet re-opened, after the costly, over-running refurbishment.
The council announcement made at the MIPIM property booze and hooker-fest in Cannes nearly six years ago was full of over-statements, hubris and down-right lies, describing South Bank Poly as “one of London’s leading universities”.
Since when, things have just got worse.
Hot air: Jo Negrini enjoyed her annual trips to Cannes for MIPIM
London South Bank doesn’t even make it into the top 10 of universities in London, ranking just 15th according to the latest list, just above a gaggle of other former polys, and trailing even nearby Kingston (it could be worse: Birkbeck opts out of the listings because of the part-time nature of many of its courses, but might very likely otherwise be ahead of LSBU).
The one good thing to come out of the Negrini initiative has been the revival of use of Electric House. Originally built to house the County Borough of Croydon’s Electric Department, the four-storey landmark building is reckoned to offer around 60,000sqft of floor space.
Electric House had been owned by property developers Minerva, who have long been a block on any progress with town centre development – they once also owned the Allder’s building, and they were behind a previous, doomed-to-failure large-scale town centre regeneration scheme which promised a John Lewis store where St George’s Walk is now.
Electric House had stood empty since 2013, when it was last used as offices for Home Office civil servants. One of the problems of getting it back into use has been the seemingly prohibitive costs of converting a Grade II-listed 1940s-designed building to suit the electrical, digital, air-conditioning and plumbing needs of the 21st Century.
When Minerva sold Electric House, it changed hands for £14million.
That price probably factored in a hefty premium for its position, at the junction of Wellesley Road and Dingwall Avenue, one of the key entry points to the proposed Westfield scheme and the long-stalled Queen’s Quarter, the developments of Nestlé House and St George’s Walk by Chinese speculators who ran out of money about four years ago.
Now, LSBU students emerging from the campus front door witness a scene of urban devastation.
There’s the underused Fairfield Halls across the road, the dereliction of the Whitgift Centre site to their right, the part demolished St George’s Walk and partly dismantled Nestlé Tower, and ahead of them the overgrown and neglected Queen’s Gardens, once a place of civic pride, with the sky-high slums of The Fold residential tower blocking out the daylight behind it.
And the best plan that Mayor Jason Perry can offer is seven “kiosks” on the ground floor of the old Allders building, including a couple more fast food joints.
The Honorary Doctorate from the LSBU can’t be long in coming for piss-poor Perry.
- A 96-page university guide supplement will be published with this weekend’s Sunday Times
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
You forgot to mention the the graffiti on top of the former HSBC bank opposite the entrance to Electric House, the adjacent empty offices, Focus House and London House, and the now-closed car park in Dingwall Avenue, next to the arse-end of the long-closed Allders. All this urban blight in a street that’s less than 400 feet long.
Property speculators have turned central Croydon into a wasteland. They’re not the solutions to our town’s problems, they are the cause of them.