UEA Maps

I've decided to use the UEA as an alien planet so I poked the internet to find a map.
... not that I'm ever going to be able to film things there but I can make an RPG outline or something.
... okay, it's about as relevant as spaceship design, but relaxing.

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And no map, or at least none I can find, gives you a hint of a clue how tall the stupid buildings are, or where, or indeed if, there are lifts. And as for finding individual room numbers, well, go for a wander on roughly the right floor, you'll find them eventually.

The only place I could find floor plans for is the UEA library, which very much needs them so I'm grateful and all but really, what about everywhere else?

... did I say this was relaxing? Er, yeah. Oops?

I don't think it's an unreasonable standard of information to want, a little picture outline that tells you where the loos are and indicates how many floors there are and what number rooms are on each floor. So if you're looking for B28 you know where to go. Or whatever the UEA room numbering system is like. I've seen maps like that for museums, and people pay much less to go to museums.

Giving it in text form is nice, and sometimes available, but still, maps are of the good.

Alien City UEA

On the google map the bit of the UEA I like the look of is about 1km long, maybe 1.2, there was a dent in the route. Wiki has a lot of numbers, like 320 acres or 1.29 km squared. It also says there's nearly 20K students. I don't know how many live there, or indeed how many turn up all at once. Even just counting the undergrads, that's as many people as live in Dereham. So the UEA is, on its own, a fair sized market town. It'd be a sight more densely packed if they all tried to stand there at once though. You'd need a lot of vertical to put them all in.

So now I'm wondering if something with the population of Dereham could fairly be called a Lost City.

The wiki article on cities gives an ancient city with a population of 40K. So, a few UEAs could be a city, if you go back to when there weren't so many billions of us. Also, the wiki on Towns says "many 'small towns' in the United States would be regarded as villages in the United Kingdom, while many British 'small towns' would qualify as cities in the United States." Also, the City of London is 2.9 square km, and has 11K people, but it's still The City. So on the whole it doesn't take many UEAs to be a lost city. It just wouldn't necessarily be a very impressive lost city once you got there.

I was thinking though that I like the snowflake pattern of Atlantis because it's tidy and looks like someone planned it. So I could make a snowflake UEA by just saying that there's lots of branches, looking pretty much the same. They'd join together where the library and lecture theatres are, and then the long bit with the lessons buildings and the ziggurats on would be repeated half a dozen times. Though rotated around the library like that you chop off half the campus, it's only 650m along Chancellors Drive, and all the buildings are either the blocky concrete sort or the big Sainsbury Centre made of glass one at the end. Which is what I wanted really, buildings that I can reckon another culture might invent if they happened to have concrete, glass, and square frames. And then something fancy to frame the transport circles at the pointy ends, let the light in on them, and look a bit like an airport terminal.

Of course that leaves out a lot of the bits people live in and just has ziggurats and a ton of classrooms and labs and offices and stuff, and it's anyone's guess how many people could live in there, but it'll be visually distinctive and have a tall bit in the middle. And sort of continue the Atlantis on a British budget theme.

Plus it certainly sounds alien, up in the library with the wind going.
The view from the windows would have to be carefully managed though. Possibly a cross instead of a star, so every side of windows has the same view. Hmmm, even then might not quite work. *thinks*