Luxury student housing’s well and good — but I miss when Liverpool was bedsit land

Good morning! It’s September, which means one thing: an influx of new students. But as Melissa Blease notes, the student experience in Liverpool has changed radically since the 80s — instead of “the kind of flat where clingfilm sellotaped to the window frames kept draughts at bay and an Ascot water heater over the kitchen sink was considered a luxury”, students now have so many options. One of which is the “premium student apartment”. But is underfloor heating, a vending machine on every floor and private balconies something that students in Merseyside actually need? That’s after the news briefing.

Your news briefing

A mother and three children died in a house fire in Stone Square, Bootle, early on Tuesday morning. Six fire engines found the house “well alight” at 3:45am – and four people in an upstairs bedroom showing no signs of life. One other person is being treated in hospital. A neighbour recalled screams and commotion outside, and Chief Fire Officer Nick Searle said the "intense fire spread very rapidly.” 

Queue area expansion approved for matchdays at Sandhills. Liverpool council’s planning committee approved the application to extend the Merseyrail station waiting area after it was likened to various horrific images of Nazi Germany by two Liberal Democrat councillors, thrust into the national conversation by way of Steve Rotheram, and subject to a fantastic bit of analysis by our own Laurence Thompson. 

Was the Battle of Brunanburh fought on the Wirral? An archaeology group has been attempting to establish the site of King Aethelstan’s victory for over a decade, and Wirral council have their sights on confirmation as a new tourist draw for the region. New finds from an undisclosed site to be presented in a report to a council committee could offer fresh clues.

It’s a chilly, hungover morning-after-the-night-before in early November 1981. I’m lounging across my bed feeling too exhausted to drag myself through the alcove in the corner of the room and down the three steps into my kitchen. On the radio, DJ Tony Blackburn is getting very excited about “a sensational new entry straight in at number 28 in the charts: Soft Cell, ‘Bedsitter’!”

It’s not my favourite track off Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret album (I preferred, and still prefer, the haunting electro-ballad ‘Torch’) but it offers me as good an excuse as any to remain horizontal for a while, slowly tuning in while still tuning out. “Sunday morning going slow, I'm talking to the radio. Clothes and records on the floor, the memories of the night before, out in clubland having fun and now I'm hiding from the sun, waiting for a visitor though no one knows I'm here for sure”... yup, that’s me.

Forty-five years later, and my friend Linda – who may or may not have been asleep in the room upstairs from mine on that long-ago day that was like so many other, similar long-ago days – is on the phone. 

Linda has been preparing her 18-year-old grandson Harry’s “student survival package” for what feels like the past six months. She’s bought him an air fryer, a laptop, a plush dressing gown, warm slippers and a massive sack of rice. Today, she’s packing kitchen equipment; tomorrow, she’s batch-cooking curries to fill his freezer with. 

But Harry probably won’t need those curries, or the air fryer, or the rice; his “premium student apartment” on the fifth floor of a recently-built tower in Liverpool’s Fabric District (previously known as Islington) has a food court on the ground floor. In fact, Harry probably doesn’t need to take anything with him when he makes the move – there’s a vending machine on every floor of his block and a laundry service for those that want it, while his apartment has underfloor heating, a wet room… and its own private balcony. 

It’s a long way from the type of options that were on offer for 18-year-olds in Merseyside in the 1980s — if you were really lucky, you’d get a posh-adjacent spare room in a family home off Sefton Park, but for most of us, it was either a spare room in a less hifalutin area or a grotty bedsit. But who really has it better?

Because despite Harry’s trappings and more (the fully-equipped gym; the cinema, yoga and karaoke rooms; the on-site maintenance service), Linda is worried that Harry might not “be able to cope” with living away from home. She’s also worried about her daughter paying off the remortgage she’s taken out on the house that Harry was born and grew up in to fund his new lifestyle (his rent will be £375pw.)  So yeah: Harry might have a walk-in shower — but at what cost? 

I offer a possible solution to the cashflow crisis: Harry’s mum could rent Harry’s former bedroom out to another student to generate a bit of extra income? “Absolutely not!” says Linda. “Harry wants to go home on weekends!” (Really?) “And anyway, what kind of young person would be happy in a bedsit?” (a bedsit being, for those of you not of the same vintage as myself and Linda, basically an all-in-one hutch that you sleep, eat and, perhaps, wash both your hair and your smalls in at a sink in the corner, should the shared bathroom be occupied or a spare room in a family home.)

I remind Linda that, back when we were Harry’s age, many of our friends lived in bedsits for a while – and they were perfectly happy with the arrangement too. I wonder if it’s also worth me reminding her that she and I met when she moved into a room in one of my (rented) flats as a geography student at the same age as Harry is now almost 45 years ago, having seen the postcard-scrawled advert for “room to rent: single bed (bedding not supplied), £6pw” in the window of the newsagents just down the road? She rocked up to my front door with nothing more than a duffel bag slung over her shoulder – no air fryer, no laptop… not even a packet of rice. Has she ever talked to Harry about those days? 

Probably not; to Harry’s generation, the early 1980s were “the olden days”, as irrelevant to the lifestyles of today as the rickety gas fires, damp walls and dodgy electric meters that were highly relevant to ours, back then. And that’s something that I’m very envious about. But looking back, would I really trade my experience for Harry’s?