Miles Salter: My First Month at UCRYSJ

It was the quad that did it. Looking back, I didn’t know much. I’m not convinced I know a lot now, but as an 18-year old, away from home and starting a new chapter, I was pretty naïve and wide-eyed.  

An early start

It was Monday 24^th September, 1990. I left home at 7.30am that morning, gave my Mum a hug and climbed into my Dad’s car. I had clothes, books, a tape player, lots of tapes, and an acoustic guitar. I didn’t drive yet, and Dad took me two hundred miles up the M1 and dropped me off at the University College of Ripon and York St John, as it then was.

In many ways, it was a different world. Mrs Thatcher was in Number Ten. iPhones were a long way off. So were eBay, Amazon, Facebook and the rest. Oasis wouldn’t release their first single for another three and a half years, and the Spice Girls arrived another two years after that. There were no Starbucks stores on British high streets. 

Dad said goodbye and headed back off in the car. I was left to explore my new home. I had a room on the second floor of D Block, behind the dining hall at Lord Mayor’s Walk. That evening there was a Freshers Disco. The campus was small which helped me to feel at home, as I had come from a relatively small school in Hertfordshire that also had a quad. When I saw the quad at York St John during a visit some months before, I felt straight at home! It was much nicer than the vast Manchester University campus I had seen, and felt completely lost in. 

A lively campus

I shared a room with a handsome Scottish rugby player called Alistair. He had a habit of saying ‘d’you ken?’ a lot, which meant ‘do you get me?’.  I would move twice that year – once to a shared house near Bishopthorpe Road and then, in the summer term, to Lower Temple corridor. I remember talking to Gordon McGregor, then principal, about the somewhat overcrowded campus. There’d been an error in calculating the number of students who would arrive; the 1990 intake was a lot larger than expected.

But the place was nothing if not alive. The corridors around the quad, in particular, were exciting places, as students laughed and partied and occasionally did daft stunts. There was so much life. The music block held students singing scales. Films were made. Theatre shows were rehearsed. Dance routines were prepared. Bands played gigs.  

Most evenings in that first month I was in the Students’ Union, talking to people, having a drink and playing a video game that featured battling pirates. Pints were pretty cheap and on a Friday night it was raucous and sweaty. A song that was never off the jukebox that first term was ‘Love Shack’ by the B52s. When I hear that song now it takes me right back to the Union bar, the smell of beer and the sound of laughter.  

I studied English Literature and Drama. At first Drama was my major, but I realised English was my strong point so I reversed the order.  

Looking back

In hindsight, things take on a rosy glow. I can’t pretend everything was great about that first term, there were a few ups and downs, but on the whole I retain a lot of affection for York St John, returning to study three more times between 1994 and 2013, when I completed an M.A. in Creative Writing. Nothing lasts forever. Today’s campus, and higher education generally, is very different place – but there was a lot of life there in the early 1990s.  

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