Authored by Clarence (Singapore), MSc Living Planet with Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
When the majority of Imperial students picture Silwood Park, they imagine a vibrant, enigmatic, and verdant campus alive with wildlife and flora rarely found at other locations like South Kensington or White City. In many respects, they are correct – and every vision crafted of Silwood Park is accurate!
As an ambassador for this lesser-explored segment of Imperial, I wish to emphasize the student experience, activities, and community present on our natural parkland campus in Ascot, Berkshire.
Discovering Silwood Park
Silwood Park functions as Imperial’s outdoor research facility, spanning 77 hectares and featuring ecosystems including freshwater streams, lakes, an “ancient” forest, and open fields. A quick search on iNaturalist, a platform that allows you to map and share biodiversity observations with a global network of naturalists, reveals that 1,436 species of plants, animals, and fungi have been recorded on the grounds, while an additional inquiry on eBird uncovers that 111 bird species have been observed on campus to date.
More intriguingly, Silwood Park serves as the venue for various long-term field research initiatives, with the Nash’s Field Experiment and the Blue Tit Project being two of the more prominent studies conducted here.
Life as a Student at Silwood Park
The campus is primarily inhabited by postgraduate students engaged in ecology, conservation, and evolutionary projects. Many of us are involved in a range of clubs based at Silwood Park. Noteworthy examples include:
- Chicken Club – responsible for the care of the chickens raised behind our residence halls
- Book Club – regularly convenes to discuss books of interest from their reading lists
- Gardening Club – oversees the allotments in our community garden
- Conservation Club – arranges nature walks and conservation-centric activities for students on Silwood Park Campus.
As part of the larger Imperial student body, many of us also participate in activities of clubs based in South Kensington!
Additionally, we have informal clubs partaking in sports such as badminton, basketball, and pickleball (which happens to be my favourite!), hosted either at the multi-use games arena (MUGA) on campus or at indoor sports facilities in nearby towns like Bracknell or Ascot.
Alongside club activities and classes, a variety of community-led events take place on campus. Silwood Park boasts its own student council that organizes and facilitates such activities to ensure a lively and stimulating student life! In recent months, we have hosted the Silwood language exchange, where our predominantly international community came together to share languages and cultures over several weeks, and also celebrated our annual Chinese New Year at the beginning of the year, bringing everyone together to craft dumplings and couplets to welcome the start of a new lunar year. We’ve also enjoyed community-organized parties celebrating events from around the globe (like Carnival), or simply parties thrown for the sheer enjoyment of celebration.
However, my favorite campus event is undoubtedly the weekly pub quiz, organized by our student community. It’s ingrained in Silwood culture that the losing team of the pub quiz is responsible for setting up the next one, and I can proudly state that I hold the record for the most pub quizzes set this year. Even though I’ve faced defeats in many pub quizzes due to my limited knowledge of general trivia, there’s always a great deal of enjoyment to be found with good company and a nice pint of beer.
Silwood Park: my second home
Even though it’s situated a 30-minute stroll away from the lively essence of civilization (e.g. the