It’s the thing we see towering over Cambridge at the start of every term. Sprawling next to Grange Road, its questionably phallic tower jutting into the air. You might have been shown round by a well-meaning librarian in your first term, or looked up a book on iDiscover only to spot the dreaded words “order in reading room” and slam shut your laptop in horror. I have it on good authority that scientists never need to go in there in first year.

Unfortunately, not all of us are so lucky. What’s a student to do when suddenly everyone seems to be writing their week two essay on blood in Titus Andronicus and all the books are out of the faculty library? So, I ventured into the depths of the UL, to show, that if you put your mind to it, it really can be done.

“PhD students huddle over their theses and throw daggers at anyone who dares make a movement.”

I entered into the bowels of this formidable fortress otherwise known as the locker room. Enter code twice, it stated clearly on the doors. Easy enough, it would seem. But no. Has that key been registered? Was it meant to flash? Or make a noise? I’ve already been through six that turned out to be broken and one that was so tiny it wouldn’t fit my bag. What if it registered the wrong code and my supervision work is stuck for eternity in a UL locker?

Too late. Nothing to do now but to venture in. Two hours of work on my laptop at home has yielded the necessary classmarks, so I am at least spared the humiliation of standing in a corridor waiting for iDiscover to load. I scuttle past the entrance to the reading room, where PhD students huddle over their theses and throw daggers at anyone who dares make a movement. That “order in reading room” title can wait until the suit of armour I ordered on Amazon arrives.

The stairs up to the open stacks are cold, like a prison. As I close the door into North Wing Floor 2, it clangs shut behind me. Turns out books aren’t great sound absorbers.

I haven’t quite worked out how to turn on the light, and every corner holds the potential for ambush. It’s empty apart from a few students at the far end – I wonder if they are waxworks but decide it perhaps isn’t worth the risk to check. The flashlight on my phone illuminates half a stack until I realise it’s the wrong one.

Counting up the seemingly meaningless string of numbers, my brain gradually numbs until suddenly, lying guarded by two much thicker books like dragons in a fairy tale, my unprepossessing grey volume rests unsuspectingly on the shelf. One book captured and brought back for questioning right from the enemy’s cave.

“One book captured and brought back for questioning right from the enemy’s cave.”

I haven’t actually managed to find out if the tower has Victorian porn in it (hidden there by its creator, perhaps?) or whether the tearoom is actually a tearoom or a Macbeth-like hideout where witches make a brew of unwanted headphones, 100 year old dust and the hopes and dreams of Cambridge finalists.

However, I can report that the lights are those funny knobs with numbers on at the end of the stacks, there’s a considerably friendlier looking green staircase if you go a bit further down the stacks, and honestly, it’s actually quite fun to find out what scandalous things they used to scribble on books in the 1950s. Those scientists do miss out…..

(Oh, and my bag was fine, by the way. Just in case you were wondering)