Another conferencing whirlwind: Nottingham and London

A little bit of background

I was fortunate to have an abstract accepted for the 2014 European First-Year Experience Conference, held at Nottingham Trent University. As with the 2013 conference trip, I had a whirlwind week away, packing as much as possible into the eight days (+travel).

My reflections on what the experience meant to me are at the end of the post.

Travel to Nottingham

I flew to London in June 2014 with Singapore Airlines this time, with the usual Changi Airport stopover on the way over, having left Brisbane on a Saturday afternoon. Fortunately (and unlike the extended delay the previous year) my connection was only a couple of hours. I arrived at 6am the next morning at Heathrow after another hideous 13+ hour flight from Singapore.

I had a train booked from London to Nottingham for 11am but once I got myself to St Pancras station, I was able to change the booking to arrive in Nottingham a bit earlier than planned. I love trains in the UK and Europe! They're so comfortable and easy to use. I don't remember much about the two hour or so trip to Nottingham other than I was struggling to stay awake.

Here's Nottingham central station, taken from its website.

I recall dragging my suitcase through the city centre to the Premier Inn (the Express by Holiday Inn at the time) at Chapel Bar and feeling wrecked after all the travel. At least I had a few extra hours in the afternoon to have a wander around and find the campus for day 1 of the conference.

I liked what I saw of the central city area. This area tends to be defined by Old Market Square, one of the largest surviving town squares in the UK. There are some lovely historic buildings, and everything seems to fit together well. There’s a laid-back vibe that you don’t get in some of the busier cities. The central railway station, the town hall, and the Nottingham Trent University are all within easy walking distance of one another within the city centre area. This was actually my second visit to Nottingham, having first been to the city in 1996 during my first ever international trip. We’d only gone to Sherwood Forest, though.

The conference

Nottingham Trent University has six campuses, but the conference was held at the City campus where over 17 000 students are enrolled in a range of programs. The university, dating back to 1843, has a lovely mixture of old and new buildings, the flagships of the City campus being the Grade II listed Newton and Arkwright buildings (see photos below).

I remember the conference being super-friendly, where I reconnected with delegates I’d met in Helsinki the previous year, and in Manchester in 2011. My friend, MM, whom I’d met at the Manchester conference, was also presenting, and it was nice to know another delegate as I’m often the only person from Australia in attendance. I also remember the £2 hot chocolates I bought from a little stall that had been set up for the conference just inside the main building. There was a nice conference dinner one evening on campus and a reception at City Hall where we were welcomed by the Lord Mayor.

Interior shots from the City Hall website.

The other highlight was the walk down to the Robin Hood statue as part of one of the lunchtime activities. Super touristy, I know, but I just had to do it! The statue is not all that big, but it was a fun sidebar to the day to wander around exterior of the castle.

I also caught up with my friend, HB, whom I’d met the previous year at the Helsinki conference. HB wasn’t attending the conference, but she caught the train over from Leeds where she lived for an evening dinner get together at the Bar + Block Steakhouse next to my hotel. We had a blast catching up.

I don’t have a photo of us but here’s one of the restaurant and of my hotel (taken from their respective websites.)

The conference ran for two and a half days from Monday 9 June until lunchtime on Wednesday, 11 June. I remember going to a pre-conference workshop run by a team from Belgium on the first day. During the awful ice-breaking activity I must have talked about the weather in Brisbane and one of the presenting team found my Australian-ness fascinating. I recall him asking me about the weather throughout the conference as I said how cool it was for me – June and officially summer but not summer as I knew it!

I can’t recall much about the other presentations other than the packed crowd for the Mantz Yorke session. Professor Yorke, now into his eighties, is a major player in the employability space and in the UK Higher Education Academy. I’ve cited his work numerous times. He’s pretty famous in academic circles and sitting with the packed crowd at his session felt very much like a rock star moment.

I went to MM’s session on student transitions on the Tuesday afternoon, but I was already familiar with her work. MM is a vibrant, interesting presenter and I enjoyed being part of her session. As with other conferences I’ve attended, I didn’t find anything out-of-the-box revealing, but it’s nice to know you’re on the right track with your own practice.

The two photos of the university have been taken from their website.

My presentation was in the morning session on Wednesday and after it and the keynote by a noted American first-year experience academic, MM and I headed to Brighton where she lives. I had half an hour to present on my work on Business smart, the new first-year experience program I had designed for the QUT Business School. I was paired with a terribly academic presentation by an NTU Business professor. Eek. Mine was very practitioner-based, but the delegate who facilitated the session told me afterwards that my presentation was one of the best she’d ever listened to at a conference. What lovely feedback!

Brighton (briefly) and London: Business bits

The drive down to Brighton was lovely and I had the chance to see a bit more of pretty Nottingham as we left the city. I’d visited MM in Brighton the year before. We didn’t have time to poke around this time as the next day we were back in London. MM had wrangled me an invite to the Future of postgraduate education forum at One Wimpole Street, a posh conference and meeting room venue in London’s exclusive SW1 district, a few minutes’ walk from Oxford and Regent Streets. I mostly remember the posh venue! I felt slightly like an imposter at this rather grand event, but I enjoyed learning about the post-graduate scene in the UK. It's so cool that interesting things are available to attend when you live in a place that doesn’t suffer the tyranny of distance.

Photos of the conference venue from their website.

One thing that does stick out is that I lost my train ticket in the rush to get to the venue on time. Despite MM’s best efforts to persuade a ticket person that I did actually have a valid ticket, I had to buy another one-way ticket that evening. Shame!

After the forum we went for a wander. You can see me below outside Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters. We had a yummy pub dinner with a colleague of MM’s from Coventry University, then headed back to Brighton on the train.

That's my dinner in the top lefthand shot, in the days before I became a vego. Interesting presentation of the meal!

There was more travel the next day as I headed to Harlow for two meetings. MM must have dropped me at the train super early, as it’s about a two-and-a-half-hour trip to Harlow from Brighton on the train with two changes. Why did I go to Harlow, you ask? Good question! The first meeting was with Pearson Education, whose headquarters at the time were in Harlow, right next to the train station. I was leading an employability project at the University of Queensland at the time, and the meeting with Pearson was to discuss their relevant products and the possibility of utilising their resources for our work. I had a connection with Pearson through the publication of the academic skills textbooks I’d co-authored while working at QUT. There's a photo of the Pearson building in the below collage. I've discovered that Pearson is no longer there and the building has since been repurposed as a block of flats.

Photo of the old Pearson HQ building sourced here. The photo of my hotel is from their website.

The other meeting I had was with Jane Murray from Anglia Ruskin University. I’d found through researching what other universities were doing that Anglia Ruskin had a practical, sound strategy (the purple booklet in the above photo). I emailed Jane, the head of employability at the time, and arranged to meet her for a chat. She very kindly drove to Harlow from the Chelmsford campus (around half an hour away) and we had a super helpful conversation in the lobby of my hotel. I felt rather brave and grown up organising these meetings from Australia!

I stayed in the Holiday Inn Express overnight at Harlow before heading back to London the next day (see above). Like the Premier Inn in Nottingham, it was basic but clean and served my needs. No fancy hotels when travelling on university business!

London: Fun bits

The business bit over, I headed to London on the train for my long weekend of personal time. My flight left Heathrow at 10pm on the following Monday evening, so I effectively had three days to relax. My friend, KP, who lives in London, was away on holidays, so another friend, AD, booked me into the rather lush Richmond Hill Hotel for two nights. The Georgian-style hotel was established in 1726 and is now a luxury B&B-style accommodations. I did feel slightly out of place in all the grandeur.   

Richmond is a gorgeous part of London but only for the uber rich. It’s the greenest borough, I think, surrounded by the magnificent Richmond Park. It’s a bit of a trek out there from the city centre, but I did love wandering around the streets as I headed to and from the Tube station over my long weekend.

I met AD off the train from Harlow at Liverpool Street station on Saturday morning and we made the journey out to Richmond so I could drop off my suitcase. Our main activity for the day was the Houses of Parliament tour that we had pre-booked. It sounds a bit nerdy, but the tour is actually very interesting, and the interior of Westminster is rather stunning. The tour is one of the best things I’ve done in London. Unfortunately, after a warm start to Saturday, it turned out to be a cool and dreary weekend. I remember feeling cold and not dressed warmly enough.

No photography is allowed inside but I have taken the interior shots from the tour website.

We had a lovely poke around London for the remainder of the day. The V&A has loads of perpetual free exhibitions but there's usually a special exhibition on for a limited period. We went to the Wedding Dress 1775-2014 exhibition this time. That’s the thing about London, there’s always something interesting to do! We also stopped by the always-fun M&Ms World in Leicester Square on our way to dinner before I headed back to Richmond for the night and AD to Rochester where she lives.

We met again on Sunday morning at Tower Hill station and headed to Greenwich for our day out to a part of London I hadn’t yet explored. We did the Cutty Sark tour which again sounds super nerdy but was actually really fun and interesting. The Cutty Sark is a clipper ship built in 1869. It’s one of the fastest tea clippers (a type of merchant sailing ship) built before steamships took over the sea routes. Clipper ships have a long, narrow hull, a sharp bow, and three raking masts.

The ship sailed to Australia in the late 1800s, along with 15 other countries, for wool trade. According to one source, the ship sailed the equivalent of two and a half return voyages to the moon! The Cutty Sark was a working ship for 52 years, a training ship for 22 years, and has been a museum since 1953. The ship is now part of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and listed as a Grade I monument and the world’s only surviving extreme clipper.

The gallery beneath the ship holds the world’s largest collection of ships’ figureheads. It’s a fab experience to walk on the deck and the museum gallery, but the part I liked the best was walking under the ship’s hull. Part of the preservation work on the ship was to lift the copper alloy and zinc composite hull over 3 metres and relieve pressure on the keel. This engineering marvel allows visitors to walk beneath the ship and touch the hull. We had soup for lunch in the café under the hull. Nice!

To round off our day out we walked up to the Royal Observatory. Greenwich is of course most famous for its maritime history and putting its name to 0⁰ longitude (the Greenwich Meridian) and Greenwich Mean Time. Here you can see me standing on the prime meridian line. Awesome.

Greenwich is very pretty, and, despite the cold and my lack of warm clothing, I loved walking through Greenwich Park. Greenwich is a super posh and expensive part of London, and there are absolutely stunning homes and lots of leafy green spaces. Greenwich is actually within the ceremonial county of Greater London, only around 9km east-south-east of Charing Cross. Greenwich has a long history, dating back to the Bronze Age.

I was quite content to spend time on my own on my last day in London. I had breakfast at Pret a Manger in Richmond before dragging my suitcase to the luggage storage service at Paddington station. I went to the Natural History Museum in the morning. Being a weekday it was full of kids on school trips, but I had a blast poking around the exhibits, and especially loved the dinosaur stuff. 

I spent the rest of my day in and around Trafalgar Square and Westminster. I visited the National Gallery. I'm more a museum than art gallery type, but I recall spending loads of time at the gallery. The paintings on display are incredible and it's easy to get lost in there.

There's something about central London that draws me in. The city is so familiar to me now and I absolutely love wandering around its streets. This was my fourth visit!

My whirlwind week

So that was it! It was another super busy week with loads packed into a short time. The conference was one of the better ones I've attended and I liked the community vibe to it. The chat with Jane from Anglia Ruskin was also a huge boost to the work I was doing on employability at the time. It goes without saying that I was thrilled to be back in London, a city I love and with which I am now so familiar. I would be back in London again the following year, this time for a work project. Read on for more London adventures!