Arty by Association

There are a lot of things I love about returning to study. For a start the learning is great, I'm sucking up knowledge like the proverbial sponge. Testing and stretching, challenging my brain, which has been largely ignored for the best part of three years due to the baby onslaught (by the way, secretly very relieved it's still able to function in any sort of intellectual capacity), on everything from PR professionalism, to contemporary practise, organisational strategy and social theory. Frankly, I can't get enough.

But there is one small area of my university experience that is slightly lacking. For those who know London you will likely be familiar with Elephant & Castle, the less than salubrious location where I have chosen to attend school. For those who don't know of its charms let me paint a picture.

The Elephant is an area ripe for redevelopment, as an estate agent might tout. Like many parts of London it is up and coming, it's just lacking tangible evidence of being either up or coming at this stage. Huge amounts of cash has been earmarked to regenerate the area but any significant improvement has yet to materialise. Demolition of the once notorious Heygate Estate has started in earnest, however, and once those iconic blocks of flats are gone the area will be irreparably changed. Strangely it feels a little sad to think those graffitied monoliths, all stark architectural testament to urban decay, will no longer be there.

So every morning I enter the Elephant through a tired looking shopping mall where the litter-strewn escalators are frozen in time, the entrance doors are busted and the windows smashed. I step outside into an acutely unfashionable market, somewhere you probably wouldn't want to venture late at night, then on through an underground labyrinth of tunnels, where cheery homeless chaps sheathed in cardboard greet me whatever the weather, to reach the hallowed halls of LCC. To say it has been a shock to the system for some of my colleagues coming as they have from the leafy, well-healed campuses of North America, Europe and Asia would be an understatement.

I carry on into the council estate-esque tower block that constitutes our learning space, where fully-functioning heating and plumbing and toilets that flush are the stuff dreams are made of. A clunky, overcrowded lift carries me begrudgingly up to the 14th floor; I sit in drafty rooms with taped up windows listening to the sound of sirens far below as police cars on a continuous loop play chase with London's law-evaders. I can safely say I've earned my gritty and urban stripes.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's no campus feel at LCC. We do have a couple of old picnic tables on the dirty footpath in front of the building where you can look out on the belching mass of cars, endlessly circling a giant roundabout, spewing out noise and pollution 24 hours a day. It's nice. But I've been to the beautiful, canal-side, architecturally designed converted granary in Kings Cross that is Central Saint Martins college and I know where my tuition fees are being spent (I'm looking at you UAL administration) and it's not on LCC's dysfunctional boiler.

But despite its aesthetic failings I wouldn't want to be anywhere else not least because I will leave with a very well regarded master's degree, all things going according to plan of course. The external trappings belie a vibrant, creative hub, every spare inch of which can and is used as exhibition space for a continuous cycle of art installations. The latest sees a selection of works celebrating the life of influential graphic designer Tom Eckersley from the archive which is held by LCC. Amazing posters from the 1940s-1980s which I can't pass by without stopping to appreciate. Makes coming to uni worth it.

Confession time: I still get excited each time I arrive at school, a small self-satisfied swelling in my chest occurs as I pass through the electronic gates knowing that I'm a student at University of Arts London. I know, I'm such a dork but the novelty of being a student again hasn't yet worn off and to be studying PR in a creative environment is so much more appealing than being stuck in an uptight business school. So I can forgive the dodgy location and the lack of green space, just surround me with art and artistic types and it's all OK.