Authored by Clarence (Singapore), MSc Living Planet with Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
When the majority of Imperial students picture Silwood Park, they visualize a verdant, enigmatic, and green campus bustling with wildlife and flora seldom encountered at other campuses like South Kensington or White City. In numerous ways, they’re correct – and every representation of Silwood Park holds true!
As a member of this lesser-known enclave at Imperial, I wish to underscore the student experience, activities, and community within our natural parkland campus in Ascot, Berkshire.
An overview of Silwood Park
Silwood Park serves as Imperial’s outdoor research facility, covering 77 hectares and featuring ecosystems such as freshwater streams, lakes, an “ancient” forest, and expansive grasslands. A brief search on iNaturalist, an application designed for mapping and sharing biodiversity observations worldwide with a network of naturalists, reveals that 1,436 species of plants, animals, and fungi have been recorded on campus, and an additional search on eBird indicates that 111 bird species have been cataloged thus far.
More fascinatingly, Silwood Park also hosts numerous long-term field research initiatives, with the Nash’s Field Experiment and the Blue Tit Project being two of the more recognized studies undertaken on-site.
Student experience at Silwood Park
The campus primarily accommodates postgraduate students engaged in projects related to ecology, conservation, and evolution. Most of us belong to various clubs based at Silwood Park. Some notable examples include:
- Chicken Club – responsible for caring for the chickens raised behind our residence halls
- Book Club – who regularly convene to discuss interesting selections from their reading lists
- Gardening Club – who oversee the allotments in our community garden
- Conservation Club – who organize nature walks and conservation-focused activities for students on Silwood Park Campus.
Being part of the broader Imperial student body, many of us also engage in activities from clubs based in South Kensington too!
Informally, we also participate in clubs that focus on sports like badminton, basketball, and pickleball (my personal favorite!), either on the multi-use games area (MUGA) on campus or at indoor sports facilities located in nearby towns such as Bracknell or Ascot.
In addition to club functions and lessons, we host numerous community-led events on campus. Silwood Park has its own student council that organizes and facilitates such events to ensure we have an engaging and dynamic student life! In recent months, we’ve held the Silwood language exchange, where our predominantly international community united to share our languages and cultures over several weeks, and we also celebrated our annual Chinese New Year event at the year’s start, where everyone collaborated to create dumplings and couplets to welcome the lunar new year. We’ve also staged community-organized parties celebrating various global festivities (such as Carnival) or simply gatherings organized for the love of celebrations.
My favorite campus event, however, must be the weekly pub quiz, arranged by our student community. It’s a part of Silwood culture that the quiz losers are responsible for organizing the next one, and I can confidently assert that I hold the highest number of quiz sets this year. Although I have lost many pub quizzes due to my limited general knowledge, there’s always a lot of fun to be had with great company and a good pint of beer.
Silwood Park: my second home
Even though it’s a 30-minute walk from the lively atmosphere of civilization (e.g., the train station and the nearest village), life at Silwood Park has never felt dull or insufficient. Besides the multitude of events and activities, we share a warm and inviting community made up of students from across the globe. All of us cherish nature, love