Atlantic House, Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London.

On one hand, Kensington is a good place to be, on the other...

It was a dorm--not as nice as I'm used to, but during the year, I live in one of the newer colleges on campus, so I expected it. There are sinks in the rooms, but we have to go down a flight of stairs to get to showers and toilets, which can be annoying if you forget your security card and get locked out of your floor. We interns were placed on the top floor, even though we had the most suitcases of any group in the dorm, and were staying here the longest. We were also the only ones that had to go past the security door to get to our bathroom--everyone else had bathrooms on their floor. There was also a week where we had only hot water, making it painful to wash our faces in the morning; I was shocked it took so long to fix. We also had construction waking us up by 8 AM every weekday and some Saturdays for most of the summer.

After the last session of summer students left, they stopped feeding us in the cafeteria, which I could understand. What I didn't like is that we had no access to any kitchen facilities, except for a 3x4x4 ft fridge and a microwave for 24 people to share. Instead of feeding us, they gave us vouchers, which only worked in a handful of places, most of them grocery stores--and how could we cook anything?

When a mirror fell on our floor and shattered, we were told by the office that we'd have to wait til our Monday cleaning day to have it vacuumed--it was a Thursday.

For the ~200 people living in the dorm, there were 3 washers and 3 dryers, which didn't function well and broke repeatedly. It didn't help that students from 10 years ago and staff (kitchen and cleaning) were using them. When we tried to talk with the office about it, they didn't see a problem.