The UCLU are lobbying for the takeover of the Harrie Massey Lecture Theatre to turn it into a full-time performing arts centre, leaving it unavailable for teaching. The Massey LT is the main and only lecture theatre for the entire UCL Physics department.

The Physics department is already under size constraints, we often use lecture theatres from other departments which are too small to seat all the attending students. Taking away our only large capacity lecture theatre would be highly damaging to UCL undergraduate teaching.

Each open day for the potential first years begins there, and to current students, ‘the department’ is synonymous with the Massey. If we lose this, part of our department’s identity would be lost.

To quote the head of our department, Jon Butterworth (also a researcher at CERN and writer for the Guardian): 

“The Massey LT is the emotional home of physics teaching at UCL. Massey was one of the biggest name scientists at UCL, the ‘father of UK space science’, and the theatre is something many P&A students remember as the place they learned… you can read stories of Peter Higgs lecturing there in the 1960s.”

The UCLU are marketing this as ‘saving our theatre’, glossing over the fact they are displacing an entire academic department for the sake of an extra-curricular activity. The physics department was only informed in May, even though a decision was made in March (http://uclu.org/articles/your-student-theatre-saved). Whilst we support the UCLU Drama Society's need for an on-campus theatre, we do not do so at the expense of our own department. We petition the Union and Provost to find a more suitable location.

We feel extremely passionately about saving our lecture theatre. Please sign our petition below.