Look I don’t really understand how businesses work and I’m not going to pretend I do. This is less of a valid opinion, and more of a personal fantasy of mine.
My demand is simple: I want a bakery near campus. Not a cafe with overpriced scones and slices. A bakery that is overflowing with bread and scones and croissants and pies and all of the other treats that you can get at a bakery.
In my dream, the bakery smells incredible, like the Subway fresh bread smell but real, and a lot better. They have a whole range of bread, from rye to ciabatta, as well as bagels, scones, and almond croissants.
As you walk past, across the Albany Street pedestrian crossing which has been specially built because of this amazing bakery that has opened near campus, the delicious aroma wafts out to greet you. Suddenly, we can’t smell Gregg’s burning their coffee anymore because the bakery smell is so delicious.
Near campus seems, to my uneducated mind, like the perfect place to have a bakery. There are lots of flats nearby, so people who aren’t buying lunch are still going to be keen to buy bread to take home to their flat.
A bakery is both more affordable and more consistent in quality than cafe food. You can rely on the rye bread or the pies from a bakery being the same every day, because the same people are making them with adequate facilities.
Just imagine on one of those days when you roll up to campus late, without breakfast, and you get out of your lecture hungry. You could go to a café and buy an overpriced, dry-ass scroll. Or you could go to the bakery and buy the perfect almond croissant. Then you could buy a loaf of ciabatta for your flat, which is perfectly crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle, and a Danish for later, which you could warm in your jacket’s inner pocket so that when you get back home after a long winter’s day studying, you have a perfectly temperate snack. It would be a beautiful thing.
Without a bakery, we’re missing out on that experience. I can’t cycle into campus and return home with a baguette in my bike’s basket. All I can do is spend too much money getting gouged on average scones.
Save me from this bakery-less hell scape. BComs, Sign Up Club, and the next Vice-Chancellor — I’m looking at you to make this happen.