Royal Holloway Food: Where to Eat on Campus

Royal Holloway has more places to eat than a first-year tends to find, and most people settle into one of them by week three and never explore further. This is the full picture: what each outlet actually is, what it is good for, and where to go when campus catering has shut.

At a glance

• All-day default: Crosslands, in the Founder's Building.
• Proper cooked meals: Founder's Dining Hall and Founder's Kitchen.
• Hot international food: the Hub.
• Best vegetarian and vegan range: the Boilerhouse Café.
• Working through lunch: the library café inside the Emily Wilding Davison Building.
• Groceries without leaving campus: the Union Shop.

Crosslands

Crosslands sits in the heart of the Founder's Building and is the outlet most students end up treating as a second common room. It runs barista coffee, cooked breakfast and lunch, and pizza in the evenings, with a fully stocked bar alongside.

What makes it the default is everything around the food: a pool table, table football, a pile of free board games, a book swap and regular live music. It is the one place on campus that works equally well for a coffee between lectures, a long afternoon of not-quite-working, and a drink in the evening without committing to a night out. If you are meeting someone and neither of you has suggested anywhere, it is Crosslands.

Founder's Dining Hall and Founder's Kitchen

These are the two to know for an actual meal rather than a snack.

• Founder's Dining Hall does home-style cooking at breakfast, lunch and dinner, with several build-your-own options. It is the closest thing to a canteen in the traditional sense, and it is where catered-hall students eat.
• Founder's Kitchen runs food from around the world alongside a salad bar and a value counter. The value counter is the one worth knowing about if you are watching what you spend across a term rather than across a day.

Whether you are on a catered or self-catered contract changes how much you use these, and which halls are which is covered in the halls and student accommodation guide.

The Hub, the Boilerhouse and the library café

• The Hub serves a wide selection of hot international food, and is the busiest lunchtime option in the middle of the teaching day.
• The Boilerhouse Café is the artisan end of campus catering, and it carries the widest dedicated vegetarian and vegan range. If you are plant-based and have concluded campus food is not for you, try here before you give up on it.
• The library café sits inside the Emily Wilding Davison Building, selling healthier, lighter food. Its real value is that it lets you take a break without losing your seat during an assessment period - see the library and study spaces guide.
• Imagine is the bubble tea stop, and the SCR and a rotating street-food van add to the mix.

Students' Union outlets

The Students' Union runs its own food and drink alongside university catering. The Packhorse is the SU pub and reliably the cheapest sit-down food and drink on campus, with deals that are aimed at students rather than at visitors. The SU also runs an order-ahead app for collecting food on the go, which is worth having when you have forty minutes between sessions rather than an hour.

Where those venues go in the evening - club nights, what happens at the Venue and at Medicine - is covered in the nightlife and SU venues guide.

Groceries: the Union Shop and Egham

The Union Shop on campus covers the day-to-day: groceries, frozen and chilled food, wine, beer and toiletries. It is the answer to a missing ingredient at eight in the evening, not to a weekly shop, and it is priced accordingly.

For a real shop, Egham town has the supermarkets, and it is a walk down the hill or a short bus ride. The Diamond Bus RHU runs between the Founder's Building and Egham Station at a £1 flat fare, and it is tracked live in the bus times feature, which matters more on the way back up the hill with bags than on the way down. The RHU guide has the current service.

Opening hours and the vacation trap

Campus catering follows the academic year closely, and this catches people out twice a year. Outlets cut their hours or close entirely over the Christmas, Easter and summer vacations, and weekend hours are shorter than weekday ones even in term time. If you are staying on campus over a vacation, work out what is actually open before you need dinner rather than after.

Because those hours move around, a printed list goes stale quickly. The food outlets feature in RHUL Mobile keeps current opening hours for campus outlets in one place, so you can see what is open now rather than walking across campus to find out.

Check before you cross campus

This is an independent guide, not an official Royal Holloway page. Outlets open, close and get renamed between academic years, and menus and hours change term to term. Treat the descriptions here as the shape of what is on campus, and check current hours before relying on a specific outlet being open.