New and continued support for Campus North means new plans klaxon!
It’s been an incredible year for Campus North — we welcomed our 10,000th visitor, celebrated our second birthday, hosted our 200th meet-up and won Adzuna’s Best British Workplace award! One of the biggest changes in the last year has been the opening of Bunker and the Auditorium next door, in fact this time last year we were putting the finishing touches to it.
Having the cafe and events space has been a great addition to Campus North, but when we were planning Bunker we had hoped to find a commercial operator who would run it for us — sadly this didn’t work out. As you are all aware Campus North does not receive any public funding or grants, we rely solely upon membership and commercial sponsorship to operate, and the extra space has increasingly become a drain on both our finances and resources.
Thanks to Nieka, Jon and the Bunker staff we have managed to create a real community in there from Carliol Square and the public. It’s a great space where people come to hang out on laptops, have meetings and make real connections. That is exactly what we wanted the space to become and we want that to continue.
So, with that in mind (drum roll please)…. we have made the decision to move Bunker Coffee & Kitchen into our main space at Campus North!
Drink it in guys…
The idea in creating the community in Bunker was that it would serve as a window to Campus North, bringing new people into the building and growing awareness around what we do. However with the spaces separated as they currently are we’re splitting the community and energy between the two buildings. We believe that by bringing the two spaces together we will create something even better, whilst allowing us to focus on what we do best.
In the main space, where the kitchen currently is, there will be a coffee cart selling great coffee, sandwiches and sweet treats and we’ll be bringing all the furniture and fittings across from Bunker. The double front doors will become the main entrance, and will be open to the public and our friends from Carliol square during the day. By doing this we’ll keep the main space buzzing, bringing a flow of interesting people into the space to plug in a laptop, grab a coffee, have meetings and hang out with innovative people.
We’ll go back to using the main space for large events in the evenings and on weekends, and the classroom will obviously still be available to host tech meetups Monday — Friday.
The plans don’t stop there, in fact we’re going to be making some changes to the whole of Campus, upgrading from the current Ikea/ startup look! Although it’s a good one (cough cough) we would like to create more of a clean, Campus brand throughout, extending the look and feel of what we have in Bunker throughout the building.
Our hope is to have all of our changes complete by Autumn / early Winter this year. The work will be carried out in stages over the next few months.
This isn’t a decision we’ve taken lightly and we’ve always aimed to be transparent and open about what is going on, which is why we wanted our community and supporters to know first.
We’re looking forward to making the Campus North space the best it can be, a quality coworking hub that offers real value for the region. It is the community that is at the heart of everything we do and we hope to have your continued support with our developments.
With that being said, paint party anyone?
