“Nice cathedral. Shame about all of the students,” a visitor to Durham told me earlier this year. It’s a feeling held by many of the remaining residents of the city too. Durham is a small city, and the colonisation of residential properties by students in the very small centre is referred to in Benjamin Myers’ article (My home town: how Durham changed under Conservative rule, 9 July).
The unfettered growth in Durham University numbers over the last decade means the student population exceeds 22,000, including about 5,000 international enrolments. Unfortunately, this growth in the ability to teach more students has not been paralleled with the university’s ability to accommodate them. This has had a dramatic effect on the demography of the city, as well as a big reduction in council tax receipts needed to maintain public infrastructure.
There has been a reliance on private landlords converting family homes into houses in multiple occupation and developers putting up privately built student blocks in the city centre. Of the 18,700 students living in the DH1 (City) postcode, just over a third live in university accommodation. The others – a relatively massive number – “live out”, largely in houses once occupied by permanent residents.
There does seem to have been a deliberate university strategy to reduce its costs and “off campus” students, to the detriment of permanent residents in the city.
David Duell
Durham
• It’s not necessarily the case that residents have been priced out of Durham, or “driven out by antisocial student noise” as suggested in Benjamin Myers’ article. Many have sold their properties to landlords at great profit, or continue to rent them out having downsized, older residents included.
I – an older resident – have lived next door to students for 25 years, and they have brightened and enhanced my life. I sleep beneath a beautifully designed and handmade quilt, gifted to me last year by a student who used to live next door.
Fewer city centre pubs have closed compared to similar towns, and the high street is in transition from a shopping to a leisure destination, with a profusion of multi-ethnic restaurants, and more to come. It is still a fine place to live, with riverside walks, cinemas, a new bus station, a railway station, a hospital and many other amenities within walking distance. Perhaps Myers should have another look.
Alan Pearson
Durham
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