MOTD paragraphs for computers named after University of Nottingham halls of residence.
Named after a village in Lincolnshire that most people have driven past without stopping, Ancaster Hall accommodates around 270 students in blocks also named after Lincolnshire locations, creating an unusually coherent theme for a university hall. It became one of the University of Nottingham's first mixed-sex halls in 1970, a fact its first Warden, Dr Virginia van der Lande, apparently spent the next sixteen years managing with considerable energy. Two gilded herons guard the wrought iron gates; whether they represent aspiration or warning is left as an exercise for the incoming fresher.
Bonington Student Village occupies a campus that was built in 1915 for an agricultural college and immediately requisitioned by the War Office, which used it to house up to 500 German officers who had already failed to escape from other camps. In September 1917, twenty-two of them broke out through a forty-yard tunnel dug with a jam pot and a piece of bent zinc, hiding fifteen tonnes of soil under a lecture room; most were recaptured within hours, including one man found blackberrying and another who asked directions to the nearest railway station. The campus eventually became part of the University of Nottingham in 1947, and the barbed wire has since been replaced by approximately 650 student beds and a bar called The Barn.
Built in 1964 to house 161 women and named after the Cavendish family — Dukes of Devonshire, whose ancestral seat is in Derbyshire, making the connection to a Nottingham halls corridor only marginally less tenuous than the grass moat that separates Cavendish from the rest of campus. The hall surrounds a rose garden quadrangle, a detail that suggests someone, at some point, had aspirations. It is now mixed-sex and catered, accommodating around 284 students, most of whom will never notice the rose garden.
Cripps Hall is a Grade II listed building — one of fewer than twenty post-war structures deemed significant enough to protect — which is either a mark of McMorran and Whitby's architectural distinction or a sign that the listing authorities had a productive afternoon in 1988. Built around traditional quads with a wood-panelled dining hall and a bell tower that does, in fact, function, it is the largest catered hall on University Park and has been co-educational since 2000, a change that presumably required some adjustment. Notably, the bar does not serve alcohol, which means that for a drink residents must walk to Hugh Stewart Hall, a journey best described as a character-building exercise in putting principle aside.
Derby Hall was completed in 1963 to a stripped-down classical design by New Zealand architect Brian O'Rorke — a man better remembered for ocean liner interiors, which perhaps explains the institutional catering. Arranged around a central quad with a later extension called Matlock, it accommodates around 334 students, all of whom will become personally acquainted with the fire alarm at 3am courtesy of someone's toast. The pantry kitchen contains a toaster, a microwave, and an ironing board, suggesting the architects had a very particular vision of student life.
Florence Boot Hall opened in 1928, funded and furnished by Florence Boot — wife of Jesse Boot, who donated the land the entire campus sits on, which suggests the family had form for this sort of thing. Florence herself invented the Boots Book Lovers' Library, which at its peak had half a million subscribers, making her arguably more interesting than the hall named after her. A £15m refurbishment completed in 2023 has brought it, at last, into the era of functional heating.
Hugh Stewart Hall occupies a pleasantly wooded corner of University Park, its 340 beds arranged across twelve accommodation blocks each named after somewhere in Lincolnshire, a county not otherwise known for inspiring people. Designed by F.E. Wooley and opened in 1962, it describes itself as the largest and most traditional catered hall, a distinction it upheld with some vigour by remaining all-male until 1997. Until 2006, it also housed the last student-run bar on campus, a torch it carried until the university apparently decided that was quite enough of that.
Named in equal parts after a district of Nottingham and a man whose principal achievement was being the last Principal of University College Nottingham, Lenton and Wortley Hall occupies the quieter northern end of campus where, according to student lore, nobody ever seems to encounter its residents anywhere else. The hall's crest features a squirrel, which feels about right. Originally two separate halls, they were merged at some point in the 1980s, presumably because one of them wasn't doing enough on its own.
Lincoln Hall opened in 1962 with a gatehouse complete with turret — an architectural choice that suggests someone got carried away — and remained single-sex until 1997, which at least explains the turret. It has since reinvented itself as a Quiet Zone, where alcohol is discouraged and reasonable bedtimes are not, making it arguably the only hall in Britain that a politician would be proud to have lived in. Appropriately, its most notable JCR President went on to become MP for South Holland and the Deepings, a constituency that sounds exactly like somewhere a quiet zone would be.
Melton Hall occupies the crescent-shaped postgraduate end of Jubilee Campus, a site which was, until 1999, a bicycle factory — a fact the architecture does nothing to discourage you from pondering. Designed by Sir Michael Hopkins and named after Melton Mowbray, a Leicestershire market town better known for pork pies than academia, it is the university's sole concession to housing people with master's degrees, offering 149 en-suite rooms and kitchens shared between up to thirteen adults who presumably know better than to leave their washing-up. Rooms facing the car park are reportedly larger than those facing the lake, which tells you something about the priorities of the crescent's geometry if not the architect.
Named after a Nottinghamshire market town whose civic motto — adopted in 1912 to commemorate a Civil War siege — translates loosely as "Trust in God and Sally Forth", Newark Hall carries this spirit of mild defiance into its role as the second-largest hall on a campus whose library sits in an inverted cone on an island in an artificial lake. Designed by Sir Michael Hopkins in the shape of a figure-of-eight, it houses around 400 students who eat not in their own dining room but in a shared restaurant with the residents of Southwell Hall, a democratic arrangement that presumably builds character. King John died of dysentery in the original Newark in 1216; conditions here are understood to be somewhat improved.
The smallest hall on University Park, Nightingale has been quietly compensating for its 157 beds since 1950, going mixed in 2000 and upgrading to three-quarter beds and mini fridges in 2007, both of which are now considered unremarkable. Its first warden, Audrey Beecham — poet, historian, and reportedly still in residence — is said to haunt the building, which for a hall this small feels less like a ghost story and more like a space problem. The lift also has a button for a fifth floor, but there are no student rooms on the fifth floor; the university has not commented.
Rutland Hall takes its name from England's smallest county — a place so modest it was removed from official maps in 1974 and had to mount a campaign to be reinstated in 1997, which it eventually was. The hall itself opened in 1964 as a men-only institution, achieved the rather lower bar of admitting women in 1970, and was comprehensively refurbished in 1999, suggesting the original fittings had made their feelings known. Its most architecturally distinctive feature is an octagonal library, which is either a charming quirk or a space-efficiency puzzle, depending on how many right angles you feel a bookshelf deserves.
Built in 1963-64 by J. Fletcher Watson as an interpretation of the traditional collegiate quadrangle using "contemporary forms and materials" — which in practice meant white shiplap weatherboarding that gives the whole thing a faint air of being somewhere in New England rather than Nottinghamshire. Named after Sherwood Forest, though any romantic associations with Robin Hood are somewhat tempered by the launderette. Originally all-male, a tradition that has since been quietly retired along with, one hopes, most of the attitudes that accompanied it.
Southwell Hall takes its name from a small Nottinghamshire market town most famous for a medieval minster that historians describe, without apparent irony, as a "hidden gem" — which is perhaps what you call something when it lacks the pulling power of, say, York. The hall itself sits on the former Raleigh Bicycle Company factory, a detail the university commemorates with a metallic bicycle sculpture and a studied silence about the fact that production moved abroad before the site was sold. With 205 en-suite rooms and a dining arrangement shared with Newark Hall, Southwell offers the particular camaraderie of students who must cross a car park to eat breakfast in another building's company.
Named after the Willoughby family, whose nearby Wollaton Hall was built in 1580 by Sir Francis Willoughby largely on the proceeds of coal mining — a venture that subsequently bankrupted him. The university reciprocated this tradition of ambitious construction on a strained budget by erecting Willoughby Hall in reinforced concrete in 1964, making it the first hall on campus to be built in such a manner, presumably because nobody had tried to stop them. Wollaton Hall has since served as Wayne Manor in a Batman film, which the family almost certainly did not foresee when they named themselves after a village in Nottinghamshire.