ANNUAL ROOM BOOKINGS

Annual Room Bookings - 

An annual room booking is regular booking that occurs in the weekly (and in the same space) throughout the Autumn and Spring academic terms. We offer annual room bookings to any of our affiliated Club’s Societies and Projects, so you have the space to hold regular on-campus activity through the academic year. Does your core activity include regular meetups, training sessions, rehearsals or talks? The Student Union has lots of spaces to offer across the Union Building and Colleges to help facilitate your regular activity. 

Please note that annual room bookings start from the second week of the Autumn term and aren’t valid for the Christmas and Easter vacations. Also – there is an opportunity to extend your annual room booking into the summer term, but this offer will be made available to student groups at the end of the Spring term. 

ANNUAL ROOM BOOKING PROCESS 

Step 1 — Ensure the Student Union knows about your regular activity 

Annual room bookings are for core or low risk activity only. These activities should be covered by your core risk assessment.  

Step 2 — Choose a room 

To help you choose what room you need for your activity please see a full list of bookable spaces and rooms in the CSP Bookable Spaces article.

College Spaces are available to book from 18:00pm on weekdays and from 9:00 on weekends. Rooms in the Union Building are available to CSPs from 9:00am – 23:00pm every day. 

Step 3 — Choose a time 

To efficiently manage the accountability of spaces across the full academic year, the Student Union allocates Annual Room Bookings in four-hour slots only. It is possible to make smaller bookings, via the ad-hoc room booking form – but, if allocated an annual room booking, your student group will be held accountable for that space across the four-hour regular booking slot. 

Step 4 — Submit the Annual Room Booking Form.

Upon receipt of the Annual Room booking form, you will be invited to submit up to three requests. Please be aware that these will be treated as three separate requests as your student group is allowed up to 12 hours of regular bookings a week. Also – each student group can submit a maximum of one form. If you submit multiple forms, we will treat your most recent submission as your final decision. 

Step 6 — Booking confirmation and further requests 

For the academic year 2025-26 the Annual Room Booking process will be open from Friday 1st August to Friday 15th August. After this date, submissions go into review – with space being shared as fairly as possible. As policy all student groups who submit a booking will have at least one space allocated to them but (due to the demand for this service) we cannot 100% guarantee that you will get any of you preferred spaces. 

Allocations will be communicated out to groups a further two weeks after the forms closure.

Room Booking Policies

As well as the space we have in the Student Union building, we have lots of space across the college that CSPs can book. This is because the Union has built a good working relationship with those colleges. On an annual basis, the spaces CSPs are allowed to book are reviewed by those college departments.  

The terms and conditions for using this space is outlined in our Imperial College Union Room Booking Terms & Conditions. This policy is then upheld in practice by individual bookers.

CSP Room Booking Etiquette
The spaces the college allow us to use is highly dependent on how well our CSP’s look after the spaces they book and how well they follow the process related to those spaces. It impacts education and learning when of an evening, student groups have left a room or space in a poor way after their bookings.

Leaving rooms in the condition and layout you found them in, is the most basic etiquette we expect of our CSPs. A diagram of a room’s default layout can be found at the front of most College Spaces. Please use this when resetting the room to the layout you found it in.

If a CSP is found to be repeatedly breaching the Room Booking Terms and Conditions or if the Union receives a complaint from a college department regarding a booking, the Student Union will issue the CSP a warning. Repeated breaches of the Room Booking Terms and Conditions will lead to a CSP’s room booking privileges being revoked.  

The principles of swapping room bookings 
We understand that, in some instances, student groups will swap their room bookings with each other. Although we recommend that groups use our ad-hoc room booking process for securing on-campus space for student activity, in the event of a room booking swap we ask for the following: 

• Written evidence of a swap communicated between two committee members (one from each group). This evidence can be submitted to the Activities Team prior to the activity (for validating) or you can just keep hold of it (as we may ask to see it long after the activity has taken place). 
• Please note that, in an instance of space misuse, we will hold the student group who holds the booking accountable – unless we see written evidence that a swap took place. 

The general principle: cover your back. When you book on-campus space, you take responsibility for the condition of that space - for the time you booked it. If you are trading that responsibility with another CSP committee, you will need to be able to prove it. 

Our spaces are bookable to ICU affiliated CSP members only – therefore, you can only swap bookings other ICU affiliated CSPs. For a full list of our ICU affiliated CSPs see our A-Z.

FAQs