Love Our Buildings

Love Our Buildings: A new approach to how we care for our campus

Report issues

If you are in the buildings covered by the trial and spot an issue, you can report it to your Building Champion by emailing loveourbuildings@imperial.ac.uk

Love Our Buildings is a new approach to how we manage and maintain our campuses. 

It is a recognition that we need to design a model that makes responding to everyday maintenance frustrations easier and quicker. If you spot an issue, it should be solved as soon as possible and with minimum disruption. 

How we do this is via the creation of two new teams:

 

Pillars of activity

Building Champions

We're introducing friendly, familiar faces that you'll see regularly around your building to provide easy points of contact.

Champions will proactively coordinate how defects are fixed, make sure rooms are in top condition, and find ways to improve the building experience.​

Small works

To support the Building Champions, we've created a rapid response small works team of tradespeople for day-to-day, non-urgent maintenance. The team will speed up how we respond to everyday issues, with an objective to initially respond to maintenance requests within 4 hours (during working hours).

Trial period

Love Our Buildings is launching as a trial initiative, initially only covering five buildings on the South Kensington campus. These are:

  • Abdus Salam Library
  • City and Guilds Building
  • Royal School of Mines
  • Sherfield Building
  • Sir Alexander Fleming Building

The trial will last from August to December 2024. This will allow us to monitor and review the programme effectiveness before potential scaling up.

What kinds of jobs are covered?

The project is designed to improve how we respond to 'low-level' maintenance issues; problems that are not necessarily urgent, but nonetheless cause everyday frustrations. This includes:

  • Window drafts
  • Flickering or faulty lights
  • Toilet/plumbing issues
  • Broken blinds
  • Damaged walls/doors
  • Decorating issues

The ambition is that by creating additional resource to tackle these issues, we will also free up capacity for our standard maintenance teams to focus on more urgent, time-sensitive problems.

 

What is the rationale?

Our maintenance team are asked to respond to over 95,000 defect reports each year, ranging from a flickering light bulb to issues that may close entire buildings. Historically, they have been asked to prioritise issues more complex, time-sensitive defects.

As demonstrated in the 2023 UniForum survey, however, the result is that too often the ‘simple’, day-to-day fixes are too slow and are dependent on complex external contractors. Over time, this has produced a feeling that certain areas of campus are insufficiently looked after. 

Love Our Buildings aims to create more resource for the ‘smaller’ tasks, thereby freeing up our maintenance team to fully focus on the urgent issues.