Unite Students - Blithehale Court — Hotel in London

The only positive thing about this place is the somewhat nice staff. I pay £240 a week for this hell hole and it's certainly not worth it. Here is a list of major problems with this place:

The hot water gets cut off at least once a month for unknown reasons. I will receive e-mails with broken promises that the water will be "Fixed by this evening/tomorrow morning." But it always ends up getting pushed back. I once took a shower only 60 hours after the hot water got cut off (Not quite sure whether this is a homeless shelter or student accommodation) Once, they even went so far as to promise in one of their e-mails that the on-site engineer would not leave until the problem was fixed but I still did not get hot water to shower until the next evening. Goes to show the lack of urgency.

The laundry systems are down every fortnight for some reason. The only way you can do your laundry is if you have a Circuit Card whenever the system fails. They do not even provide you with the card when you move in. Most of the students here do their laundry through the Unite app which doesn't work whenever the system is down, so you're basically screwed if you don't have the card. Moreover, they take a couple of days to fix this problem while you anxiously wait.

The lifts took 2 weeks to fix. I had to climb 7 flights of stairs everyday when this happened. I pity those who stay on the highest floor. Not to mention, they break down often and they SMELL.

The vending machines do not work sometimes, particularly the ice cream machine. Whenever it does, it ends up giving you expired ice cream and it is so heavily priced that you pay £2.40 for a small cup when you can get a big tub for £2.20 at Tesco. It's a rip off. As for the snacks machine, they do not even bother to stock up whenever it's empty.

They do maintenance work every fortnight which means that they will have to enter your room. All the checks can actually be done in one go but they decide to spread it out by doing the lights one week, followed by the toilets/showers, and the kitchen, etc. It is relatively annoying if you stay here.

If you cannot sleep through noise, there is a lot of noise from the railway track with a train running every 5 minutes so do not expect to get a good night's rest.

The kitchen equipment is old. The induction hobs are out of date and the fridge is brown at the bottom. They do not even bother to replace it, yet alone clean it.

They promise fortnightly cleaning for kitchens but they rarely do it. It is only actually cleaned once a month. I once saw a cleaner come in to the kitchen when it was time for the kitchen to be cleaned, but all she did was wrap the wires around the vacuum cleaner and left.

Verdict: Do not stay here. Pay a little more for a better room (Studio) down the road at The Hive. I have friends staying there and they say it's...

Please do not pay money to live here. Here are a bunch of negatives, that far outweigh any positives:

Refuse collection point is next to lift area. This makes the elevators smell consistently like garbage, and waiting for a lift lets you smell a full complement of rotting food waste. By the way, the refuse is only taken out once a week so it is consistently full.

Exceptionally slow WiFi. The website will advertise "up to 70mb/s". Don't get your hopes up, expect 3-4 mb/s. In addition to being slow, it will also frequently disconnect. Not a problem if you're just web browsing, but don't expect to watch videos or Netflix in 720p or even 480p without stuttering.

Lazy staff. Staff are generally unfriendly and will not even respond to "Hello's". When you accidentally lock yourself out and ask for help, they will give you a "Ugh, really?" look and will only begrudgingly help you. I generally see them outside taking smoke breaks rather than actually at the front desk. Also, I have been to other Unite accomodations and they have snacks/refreshments set out each day for their students. This has happened once here, so I'm not sure if the staff are just too lazy to set these out, or if they've been eating them themselves.

Things break. I'm not sure if the building is old or what, but appliances like stoves break consistently. I've been here 2 months and our stove has been needed to be checked twice. My toilet has broken which involved it flushing 24/7. The water pressure also sucks.

It's currently November (6-12 degrees celsius) and the hot water has broken for at least a week. The fix? "We have managed to negotiate for Energie Fitness (a gym nearby) to let you use their showers". Why am I paying 230 pounds per week for such an experience? Why has this been left for over a week? And don't even try to blame the third party contractors, you should've hired better ones. The entire infrastructure of this building is a mess.

The place is next to the damn Overground. Every 3 minutes I hear the rumbling of an archaic transport system. It's loud enough to actually shake my room if I have my window open. I guarantee you will not be able to study effectively if you have a room that faces the street.

The place is next to a damn bar. You can expect rowdy drunk aggressive individuals downstairs. In addition, around 2 AM when the bar closes, they will take out their trash, so expect the sound of glass bottles shattering as they chuck them in the bin.

In general, the staff and management has managed to foster such a negative environment that I am compelled to write this review. If you are prospective student, I beg you...

I don’t not recommend this place at all. The only good thing about this place is that it is 5 minutes’ walk from the tube. Apart from that there is no other advantage unfortunately.

The room is pretty small, and the kitchen’s equipment are very old. Public areas like the lifts, stair, study place is always dirty. Which makes me wonder why the staff isn’t bother cleaning this place. The construction work has been going on since from the start of my first day being there until the last day of staying there (Feb 2022 – August 2022). During my stay at this place, I could never open my windows because there's construction noise and construction workers everywhere, from early in the morning until evening, Mon-Fri. I often get woken up by construction noise early in the morning. I even can't study in my own room or the study place in the building because of the construction noises. And I can't open the blinds in my room either, because there are construction workers from morning until evening, Mon to Fri, who can look through inside my room. It is really a pain since I have to live through summer weather, and I can’t open my windows to get some air.

Most of the reception are not friendly at all, they’re mostly on their phone talking someone or outside the building smoking. The hot water doesn't always work either and once I’ve went to the reception to kindly ask them to solve the issue, or any other issue for that matter, they simply dismissed me.

Most of the laundry machines are broken and the usable one is absolutely disgusting, it is never cleaned and filled with other people’s hair. I always have to test my luck whether there is a machine available for me to clean my clothes.

Lastly, in my opinion the building has poor ventilation system. So, during summer you’ll sit or sleep in your room drenched in sweats. I am sure that there are far more better place than this, please don’t waste...