Hello again! 

Following the reply from Estates & Facilties (and the voting and commenting which has taken place alongside it) I think we have a better understanding of how building floor numbering works across the University. There is quite a lot of building work due to start happening across the University very soon, and as such I'm going to close this submission for now but re-open it should there be any further updates. 

Thank you for the submission, and all the best in the future! 

Thanks again,

Samuel Dedman (VP Education 2017-19, vpeducation@susu.org)

Hello again! 

I've just had a reply from Estates & Facilities with some more details about why the numbering is the way it is:

The numbering protocol for Planon, our space database, was established with 4 digit unique building, floor and room identifiers (e.g. Building 1, room 1 on the ground floor would be 0001,1001). We don’t use terminology like “ground floor, first floor…etc” as the numerical references fit better with the database information storage and retrieval/searching functionality.

We have a variety of buildings on sloping sites, where there are entrances at different levels and we need to have a mechanism to record floors that doesn’t involve negative numbers. Hence in some buildings there is a level 0 below level 1 (but as you say below, in the main, level 1 is the ground floor of the building).

So it looks like this is normal operating practice for University of Southampton buildings, and does make a bit more sense the more I think about it! I'll leave this You Make Change live for voting and comments for a bit longer, so do share it around to make sure we have as much student input as possible! 

All the best,

Samuel Dedman (VP Education 2017-19, vpeducation@susu.org)

Hello!

Thanks for getting in touch. I'm not entirely sure myself as to why this is the case - in fact, I'm pretty confident that this is the same across all University of Southampton buildings. Let me start a few conversations with people at the University and I'll see where I get to. 

In the meantime your idea submission is now live for voting on the SUSU website. I'd encourage you to share it around as much as you can, as the more votes it has the more evidence we have to lobby the University with. 

If you have any questions, please let me know.

All the best,

Samuel Dedman (VP Education, 2017-19)