Bath Looks to a Build a Student-Filled Future

By 2020 Bath will have 9,200 more university students, so this week council heads in the city have met to decide how they will all be housed.

The move comes after the local authority drafted a 'Placemaking Plan' which, when finished, will outline a plan of action for student housing both in the city of Bath and the wider North East Somerset area.

The challenge that increasing student numbers poses however is one the council takes on gladly, with a representative saying it wants "to enable, as far as possible, the continued success of The UoB and BSU and the contribution they make to the city's identity, profile and employment base." The council does however acknowledge the scale of the challenge it faces as growing student numbers bring "a whole suite of demands on a highly constrained city, which is relatively small as a host for two universities and which has a limited land supply for meeting all development needs in full."

Any student developments will also have to fight for space with the many non-student plans on the cards in the city. If Bath is to avoid the lack of student housing that other cities are increasingly experiencing, it's clear they have a lot of work to do.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Creative Commons