500+ new bed spaces for UCL Accommodation at Urbanest King’s Cross

We have agreed on a partnership with Urbanest that will allow us to allocate rooms at their King’s Cross site for the next 10 years. This is a high-quality, modern site, with outstanding amenities including 200Mbps broadband, underfloor heating, bike storage, on-site laundry and communal study and relaxation spaces for work and play. 

The hall is a 20-minute walk from the Main Quad at Bloomsbury campus and its King’s Cross location has excellent train links to our new UCL East campus, so we hope students living there will take full advantage of both UCL’s historic centre and our new world-class facilities. 

Colleagues in our Campus Experience and Commercial Services team, including the Accommodation Office Team, have been working hard to secure more housing spaces for our incoming students.  

UCL’s Director of Accommodation, Joe Lay, said: “We are delighted with the latest development in our partnership with Urbanest, a highly regarded provider of student accommodation. Securing these rooms is a significant achievement, reflecting our commitment to meeting the growing demand for accommodation for UCL students. We remain dedicated to expanding our portfolio and will continue to work diligently in this endeavour.” 

The last few years have seen a major squeeze in the London rental market, with recent research by LSE and Savills indicating a 41% drop in private rental listings since the Covid-19 pandemic and rental prices 20% higher than in March 2020. 

There is a shortfall of purpose-built student accommodation in London due to challenges such as building completion delays caused by Brexit and the pandemic, and supply is struggling to meet demand.  

To take steps to address this, UCL has partnered with Urbanest on a new development in Canary Wharf that will deliver 1,672 student beds and 80 residential apartments across three towers for students of UCL. The development, situated next to Billingsgate Market in Canary Wharf, will also become Europe’s largest Passivhaus development.  

The partnership with Urbanest supports UCL’s accommodation strategy, providing a campus of well-located beds, with excellent facilities, close to first-rate transport links and strategically located between all three of UCL’s main campuses in Bloomsbury, Canary Wharf and the UCL East campus on the Olympic Park in Stratford.  

This partnership is an exciting step forward for UCL Accommodation as we continue to expand the accommodation provision for UCL students.