Tucked behind the Georgian terraces of Great Portland Street, a short walk from Regent’s Park and the Royal Academy of Music, International Students House (ISH) has been welcoming students from around the world to London for over 60 years. It is not the largest student accommodation provider in the capital, nor the newest. But something about it endures – in the loyalty of its alumni, in the stories its staff tell, and in the atmosphere residents remember long after they leave.
Dr Sharon Bolton has been Dean of Student Life at ISH for a decade. She came from the world of university student advice, and by her own admission, was not expecting quite so many complaints about leaks and toilets. What she has found instead – and has spent ten years nurturing – is something harder to quantify: a community. GSL News sat down with Sharon to talk about the philosophy behind ISH, the realities of managing 60 nationalities under one roof, and what lies ahead as the organisation opens its first new building in years.
_____________________________________
On home away from home
In a sector full of buildings that promise a “home away from home”, Dr Sharon Bolton has grown tired of the cliché. “I don’t know a single residence that doesn’t call itself that anymore”, she says.
Yet, as Dean of Student Life at ISH, she still finds the phrase useful as a reminder to her colleagues. She recalls a post she saw shared in a residential professionals’ Facebook group:‘We work in their home, not they live in our workplace.‘ It is a distinction she returns to often.
That matters especially at ISH, a multi-use building that hosts conferences by day and music events by night. Sharon gives a simple example: if a student comes down to breakfast in their pyjamas and someone questions it, her response is immediate: “That is exactly what they would do at home.”
What came through especially strongly in ISH’s 2025 GSL Index results was the kindness and friendliness of staff. That had appeared as an undercurrent before, Sharon says, but this time it surfaced clearly and repeatedly in student comments. For an organisation built around the idea of belonging, this matters.
It reinforces something deeper in ISH’s ethos. This may be a mixed-use venue, but it is first and foremost a place where students live.
The real “secret sauce”
If you ask Sharon what makes community at ISH work, she doesn’t hesitate: the Resident Advisors.
ISH recruits its RAs each spring, typically from second- and third-year students, then brings them together for three days of residential training before the new academic year begins. Rather than overloading the training with policy briefings and procedure, the point is to help them become a team. They reflect on the behaviours they saw in their own RAs when they first arrived as students: what worked, what did not, and what kind of culture they now want to create for others.
Having come into the role from a university student-advice background, Sharon was clear from the beginning that she did not want to impose a pre-packaged social calendar on residents, preferring a more organic approach.
“I want the ideas to come from the students. So we do a lot of encouraging people to come up with suggestions, and we will support them if we think it’s a good thing to do. We sometimes get crazy suggestions that we can’t do. Every year, we get asked to have a Holi event on site – can you imagine, having different coloured paint flying everywhere? It’s not going to happen. But we find an alternative way of delivering that off-site.”
Each year, the RAs begin by knocking on doors, introducing themselves, meeting students on their floors, and organising small gatherings that break the ice in a low-pressure way. Those early interactions matter especially for quieter students, who may find it easier to come to a larger event later if they know just one person.
From there, the programming grows outward from what students actually want.
Big events matter – but the small ones often matter more
ISH runs plenty of visible programming. There are welcome events, celebrations around Halloween and Diwali, and a handful of larger themed suppers each year that spotlight different cultures through food, décor and entertainment, with students encouraged to wear their national dress. Sharon recalls a French supper complete with accordion music and abundant cheese, and a Latin American evening where tables reflected the colours of several national identities.
These events are photogenic and not only provide great images for social media, but a truly memorable experience for the residents and important signals that diversity is celebrated.
But the events Sharon talks about most fondly are often the smallest ones.
A low-key Sunday “Coffee and Chill” session has proved unexpectedly impactful. There is no formal sign-up, no pressure to arrive at a specific moment, no big production. It is simply a space where students know someone will be present, coffee will be available, and conversation can happen if they want it to. From that simplicity, Sharon says, friendships have formed and conversations have unfolded that have surprised even the organisers.
The same principle applies elsewhere: movie nights are chosen by WhatsApp poll, casual floor gatherings, repeat table-tennis sessions that emerge because students enjoyed them the first time around. Sharon notes that these are not elaborate interventions, but they provide opportunities for students to take ownership.
Community does not always come from a packed events calendar. Sometimes it comes from making it easy for students to gather, linger and return.
Sixty nationalities, no dominant group
ISH currently houses students from around 60 nationalities. Of those, 27 are the only representative of their country in the building.
That fact, Sharon suggests, is one of the ISH’s great hidden advantages. Because no one nationality dominates, students are almost compelled to build friendships across borders. There is no easy retreat into a single large national group. Everyone is, in a sense, a minority.
The building itself reinforces that dynamic. This is not an environment in which students can disappear into self-contained friendship circles. People share bathrooms. They share kitchens. Many share bedrooms. They have to learn to live alongside each other.
Of course, Sharon is clear-eyed about the tensions that can come with that. A fair amount of her time is spent dealing with roommate conflict, often between students who have never shared a bedroom before and are suddenly navigating different routines, habits and expectations. Sometimes mediation works. Sometimes the solution is more practical. In one recent case, with no spare rooms available, Sharon brokered a direct swap between two pairs of unhappy roommates, solving two problems at once.
ISH also takes a more deliberate approach to allocation. Rather than filling rooms as quickly as possible, the team considers age, field of study and nationality when pairing students. And if a prospective resident indicates that they do not want to share with someone from a particular nationality, Sharon is clear: ISH is probably not the right place for them.
That clarity feels significant at a time when many operators are grappling with tensions that emerge when one cultural group becomes especially dominant within a building. Sharon’s view is not that conflict never happens at ISH. It is that culture is shaped upstream – through admissions, physical design and the everyday expectations set by staff.
Bridging divides
Perhaps the most powerful part of Sharon’s interview came when she spoke about what happens when students from historically divided communities live together.
ISH has housed Indian and Pakistani students, Israelis and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians. Sharon grew up in Northern Ireland and says one of the defining experiences of her own education was realising, once she left home, that she had more in common with people from “the other side” than she expected.
That belief in education as an enlarging human experience runs through the way she talks about ISH.
One story, in particular, has stayed with her: a Jewish student wrote a deeply personal note to ISH’s senior duty manager, who is Palestinian, thanking him and reflecting on how much he had helped him see their shared humanity. For Sharon, this kind of thing is what education is all about.
And perhaps that is the real significance of ISH. It is creating the conditions in which students learn how to live with difference rather than simply providing a place to live.
“I think that is kind of what the magic of International Students House is all about – you’re exposed to other people. You have to share a bathroom with them. You have to share a kitchen. You have to work together to make it bearable.”
What student housing can do – and what it cannot
One theme Sharon is increasingly conscious of is stress and anxiety.
ISH’s 2025 survey suggested that stress levels among residents are high, and perhaps rising. Sharon explains that many residents are on one-year master’s programmes, trying to adapt quickly to a new country and academic system while facing significant financial pressure.
“I think going back to that word homesickness, you know, it’s inevitable, and culture shock and all these things. And I think one thing that helps with that is knowing that it’s not just you.”
Universities, Sharon says, must remain responsible for academic support. Still, ISH can offer pastoral support, social connection and practical help: informal peer-to-peer help, closer monitoring through the scholarship programme, and a hardship fund that gives Sharon a sobering window into how precarious some students’ circumstances really are.
Tuition fees can be enormous; accommodation and living costs in London only compound the challenge. That matters because financial distress often appears intertwined with homesickness, anxiety and academic struggle.
Alumni who never truly leave
If proof were needed that this model leaves a mark, it can be found in ISH’s alumni.
Known as the “Goats”, in a tradition dating back to founder Mary Trevelyan, former residents remain unusually attached to the organisation. They turn up at monthly bar nights in London. They can still remember their old room numbers decades later. They come back to visit, sometimes with their children or grandchildren. One regular attendee is said to have been the very first person ever to apply to ISH.
Sharon believes that strength of feeling comes from the intensity of the experience residents had there. And ISH is trying to build on it more deliberately, not least through Coffee Connect, which pairs alumni with current residents for one-off conversations that can happen in person or online. Sometimes the result is simply reassurance. Sometimes it develops into something more lasting: mentoring, professional guidance, even internships.
In a sector increasingly focused on customer loyalty and long-term brand value, that kind of enduring affinity is worth paying attention to.
A new building and a new test
ISH opened a new building in Vauxhall in January 2026. At 185 rooms, it offers a very different experience from Great Portland Street: all single en-suite rooms or studios, kitchens on every floor, and a more contemporary layout. There is also a café open to both residents and the public, as well as a flexible amenity space designed for informal activities.
Sharon is aware that many new PBSA developments are far larger and can feel impersonal. At 185 rooms, she believes it is still possible to get to know residents as individuals. She is also thinking about how the space at the new site could support more intentional resident groupings in future – perhaps postgraduate-only floors, quieter floors, or other forms of more deliberate community design.
That could make the Vauxhall building not just an expansion, but an opportunity to try something new.
The challenge that remains
Asked what she would change, with a magic wand, about the international student experience in London, Sharon answers without hesitation: cost.
Not just tuition, though that is a major part of the burden. Also rent, living costs and the sheer fragility of students’ financial position once they arrive. Sharon sees that precarity clearly through the hardship fund. It is one reason ISH subsidises so much of what it does, from events to theatre trips and travel opportunities.
But the bigger problem is structural. In Sharon’s view, if more affordable accommodation and more scholarships could be created, the result would not just be less stress. It would be broader access, wider participation and still greater diversity.
That, ultimately, is the argument at the heart of ISH’s model. Community matters. Design matters. Programming matters. But affordability still shapes who gets to belong in the first place.
