Adrian's blog

I have lived at Connaught Hall since 1997.

I arrived as a first-year medical student, slightly overwhelmed and not yet sure what kind of person I was going to be. I stayed. Over the years the role changed: student, Resident Advisor, Vice-Warden, and eventually Warden. The building became home in the fullest sense, and somewhere along the way the work became a vocation rather than a job.

Two roles, one purpose

As Warden, I am responsible for the pastoral life of the hall. That means the wellbeing, conduct, and community experience of everyone who lives here. It means being the person students come to when something is wrong, when there is conflict, when someone is struggling, or when the situation is serious enough to need someone with authority and a duty of care. It also means the quieter work: building a community that functions well enough that fewer things go seriously wrong in the first place. I manage a team of Resident Advisors, and I live on site. That last part matters more than it might sound.

Separately, and in parallel, I am Head of Student Health and Wellbeing at the University of London. That role operates at a different scale. I work across the University's intercollegiate halls, leading on safeguarding, mental health strategy, crisis response, suicide prevention, and the development of wellbeing services and programmes. Student welfare at that level is genuinely shared work, distributed across departments and teams, each contributing something different. I am one voice among several, bringing a particular perspective: a clinical background, a focus on risk and safeguarding, a way of thinking about systems and how they protect people. I am a leader in that landscape, not the leader. That is how it should be.

The two roles are distinct but deeply connected. The Warden role keeps me grounded in the lived reality of student life. The wider role gives me a view of the bigger picture. Each makes me better at the other.

Not what you might expect

I should say something about what I am actually like, because I suspect I am not what people expect.

I am an introvert. I am more comfortable in a quiet one-to-one conversation than in a crowded room. I find small talk genuinely effortful. Before moving into student wellbeing, I spent seventeen years working in emergency medicine, which is not, on the surface, an obvious background for someone who now spends much of his time thinking about community, belonging, and pastoral care.

But the clinical background shaped everything. Emergency medicine teaches you to stay calm when the situation is not, to tell the difference between what is urgent and what is merely loud, and to understand that measured judgement is usually more useful than rapid reaction. It also teaches proportionality. Not every difficulty is a crisis. Not every crisis is what it first appears. Those instincts travel.

And the introversion, I have come to understand, is not the liability it might seem. Students who are struggling are rarely looking for someone who fills the room. They are looking for someone who will listen without an agenda, who will not be unsettled by silence, who takes what they say seriously rather than rushing to fix it. I am genuinely more interested in what the person in front of me is saying than in what I am about to say next. That is not a technique. It is just how I am wired.

Some of the most important judgements I make are the ones not to act. Knowing when a situation needs space rather than intervention, when stepping back is the more careful choice, is harder than it sounds. It looks like nothing. It is often the opposite.

Life in the building

My husband Andrew lives here too, which adds a layer that took us both some time to fully reckon with.

I have been Warden since 2009, but I have lived in the hall since 1997, and there was a time, not so long ago, when a same-sex partner living alongside a member of staff would have raised eyebrows, if not worse. That has changed, and the change matters. It matters to me personally, and I think it matters to the community. Students live in a hall where the Warden and his husband are simply part of the context, going about ordinary life in the same building, eating in the same dining room.

We are both, whether we like it or not, visible. Students notice us. They register what our life looks like, how we move through the building, what kind of household we seem to be. I hope, in some small way, that we may be positive role models, especially for residents who may come to study in the UK from a home culture where it's hard to find positive depictions of LGBTQ+ people. And so, our private and family life becomes a semi-public thing. For Andrew, who did not sign up for an institutional role, that is a genuine imposition. For me it is just the reality of what living-in leadership means.

The community sees who I am as well as what I do, and those two things have to be coherent. I think they are. But I hold that awareness carefully.

What I most want students to know

Trust is not built in a crisis. It is built in all the moments before one: small and unremarkable, accumulated without either party quite noticing. In what is not done as much as what is. The door that opens when it should. The conversation that goes nowhere in particular but establishes that a conversation is possible. The same face in the same place, over time.

That is the foundation everything else rests on. It is most of the work, and whilst it is visible, if it is done well, you should hardly notice it.