Southcoast Blog

With finally some lovely weather in Brighton this week we hope this is a sneak peak of what is to come. Here at Southcoast Conferences & Events our summer 2024 plans are in full swing and we're looking forward to a very busy and exciting summer at the University of Brighton.

Each year we open up the university’s halls of residence to those visiting our wonderful city of Brighton & Hove. Our pop up hotel at the Phoenix Halls of Residences is open for business and we’re very excited once again to be welcoming guests to the university this summer. We have our label maker and mini shampoos at the ready for the opening on the 29th June.

You can book to come and stay in a flat with your friends, as a large group attending a conference or as an international student…and P.S. we currently have a 15% early bird rate available on Booking.com so if you’re planning a trip to Brighton check us out!!

As well as our pop up hotel our university campuses also become language schools for the summer holidays, where we have young people from all over the world come and stay with us. We have several different language school providers who book to stay and with us and we are busy putting all the necessary preparations in place to make it a successful summer 2024.  

But before we even make it to the end of June we’re getting very excited about the student events taking place at the end of the academic year. We have the Graduate and MA Shows for the School of Art and Media and the Architecture & Design Show, for which the university turns into a gallery for the students to exhibit the fantastic work they’ve created during their course. We’re busy helping to organise the private views for each event, so the students can celebrate in style with their friends and family.

So, let the countdown to summer begin and we hope to see you this summer at the University of Brighton.

When the University of Brighton staff and students returned to campus in September in a limited capacity, it was evident that some changes were needed to ensure the safety of everyone physically at campus. One of the initiatives was to place so-called Campus Champions on all campuses to ensure social distance guidelines were adhered to and that everyone could feel safe returning to campus.

Southcoast Conferences hired and trained over 20 new members of staff from the student cohort to fill the new role, which quickly became a central aspect of the University’s plan to ensure the safety on campus. In the training, we went through how to handle PPE, crowd-management, and the general Covid-19 guidelines the Campus Champions needed to help students and staff adhere to. The students were also trained extensively in how to keep themselves safe while working this role.

For Southcoast Conferences, it was really important to offer this opportunity of work to students who might be struggling financially as the pandemic has impacted several jobs often held by students, including retail, restaurant, and bar work.

“Southcoast gave so many of us students who were struggling to find part-time jobs work hours,” explained Elle Babe, who was hired by Southcoast to fill the role of Campus Champion, “The café I worked in closed due to lack of customers and I was struggling to balance out my student loan without the extra income. But being told about this job and then being offered the role of Campus Champion made a massive difference in a time when everything else was so unstable.”

Fellow Campus Champion Alex Hood agreed, adding that “being a Campus Champion has helped students that have to come into university feel a sense of security and safety, as they can see we are on station to uphold the social distancing and safety guidelines.”

The Campus Champion project has run since early October and will continue until Christmas break. With students having Covid-tests done before heading back home for break, our Campus Champions will also help keep an eye on the pop-up test-centres.

We are so happy to have been a part of keeping the University campuses safe this semester and proud of our amazing Campus Champions for their great work.

The Southcoast Event Support Team has helped out with moving-in-week at the University of Brighton halls of residence for the past couple of years and this year was no different – only it was. Very different. With the COVID-19 pandemic far from over, plenty of restrictions and guidelines were set in place to make this year’s moving-in-week possible. For starters, this year it was a moving-in-week instead of a moving-in-weekend.

The Southcoast Team assisted at Circus Street Halls of Residence, Welkin Halls of Residence at our Eastbourne site, and both Falmer Halls of Residences, Great Wilkins and Paddock Fields. Throughout the week near these sites, Southcoast’s casual staff could be spotted wearing their University of Brighton branded high-vis yellow jackets, signposting the way to the halls, monitoring carparks, and welcoming the students. Eastbourne lived up to its reputation for being the sunniest town in the UK most of the week, but it was a completely different story in windy Brighton. While the Eastbourne team was sporting shorts and sunglasses, the Brighton team was almost impossible to find under the many layers of clothes.

The first-year students arrived throughout the week at allocated timeslots to avoid too many people arriving at once, clogging up the carparks or walkways. Everywhere, social distance was kept as the students collected their keys, received welcome information, and moved their things into their new home.

The Southcoast Team on-site kept to strict COVID-guidelines: staff wore masks or visors when speaking in close proximity to students, used hand-sanitizer regularly, and stayed mostly outdoors the entire week, only ever showing students to their front door.

Moving-in-week was our first in-person event since February and it provided some perspective on how to conduct live events safely with no end to the pandemic in sight. We loved welcoming the students to University and hope that everyone who has moved into halls this year has settled in well. While we thoroughly enjoyed this year’s moving-in-week, here’s to hoping that next year will be a little less… different.

Until next year!

Champagne was popped. Music was blasted. Friends and family were admiring the talent of the graduating students. The summer Graduate Shows were finally here – only this time in a very different format. With a global pandemic still putting a stop to larger gatherings, this year’s shows took place online. 

The annual Graduate Shows at the University of Brighton has been one of our yearly highlights for as long as we have been involved in organising them. Every summer is marked by first the School of Media and Arts Undergraduate Show, followed by the School of Architecture and Design show, and finally rounded up by the Postgraduate Show. Every year we are left in awe of the students’ talent and creativity, but this year they were particularly inspiring. The students have shown extraordinary resilience and creativity, having to produce their final projects in a world under lockdown. Stories have emerged of students turning their bedrooms and gardens into studios, their kitchens into dark rooms, working with whatever was available to finish their exhibition pieces.

“I think we have embraced the new online era of art,” says Laurie Morley, a newly graduated BA(Hons) Photography student, who exhibited her work in this years’ graduate show, “I felt an obvious disappointment not to have a physical show where I can celebrate my achievements with my family, friends and course mates. People worldwide had to come to terms with how corona affected us, and in the grand scheme of things we had it easy, so we all made the most out of it and saw it as an exciting opportunity. 2020 graduates were the first to showcase our work online, and in our favour, it reached a big audience through the power of the internet. Despite the elders of my family finding it impossible to understand the function of a website, it was a great space to see a huge variety of beautiful work, all in one place. Although unconventional, it was enjoyable, and the hard work put in to making it work was certainly worth it.”

The Technical team at the University of Brighton created amazing websites for the online exhibition on which the work of the students was showcased creatively and accompanied by personal artist biographies and links to the student’s socials, making it easy to contact them for potential buyers or employers. The launches of the online exhibition webpages were accompanied by live DJ sets, award shows, and panel openings, followed by an array of online events in the following month. We got to learn about the crafts of the art and media students through guest lectures, student panels, film screenings, Instagram Live events, and much more. Everyone from student to staff to the audience adapted to the challenges of moving celebrations and events online beautifully as also the prize-giving ceremonies had to take place virtually this year. Although very different, this year’s Graduate Shows were still a huge success and, in particular, showed the immense resilience of the University of Brighton students and innovative solutions everyone has had to explore in order to make this year’s shows possible.

From us at Southcoast Conference, we want to say thank you to everyone involved in making these Graduate Shows possible and a massive congratulations to all the graduating students. We are incredibly proud of you and wish you the best of luck with your futures – wherever they may take you!