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[title]Part two of ‘The Crown’ Season 6 has arrived on our screens and fans are probably half way through binging the whole thing already. There are a lot of loose ends to tie up, here: the final episodes cover Prince Charles and Camilla’s marriage, the enquiry into Princess Diana’s death, Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee and the early days of Prince William’s romance with Kate Middleton.
It’s widely known that the Prince and Princess of Wales met while studying at university in St Andrews, the small seaside town an hour and a bit north of Edinburgh. If, like me, you also went to uni there, you’ll know it’s hard to avoid the couple’s legacy: coffee shops market themselves on being ‘where Will met Kate’ (check out the window of Northpoint café) and distant family members will tease you about it before you’ve even set foot on campus.
With all of that in mind, a good chunk of episodes in the final season of ‘The Crown’ are set in St Andrews: depicting glitzy fashion shows, the blustery North Sea, ancient cobbled streets and lavish, champagne-fuelled dinner parties. Some of the portrayals are impressively true to the real life St Andrews experience – to the point where I felt weirdly nostalgic and sometimes uncomfortable while watching them. Others? Not so much.
Like Kate and William, I studied art history as an undergraduate in St Andrews. I wandered the same streets as the couple, took books out of the same libraries and in my final year, I lived opposite the flat on Hope Street where Prince William famously lived. So how accurately is the town portrayed in ‘The Crown’? I should preface this with a full disclaimer: I’ve not seen the whole of the series. In fact, I’ve only watched episodes seven, eight and nine of the second half of season six, for the purpose of this very article. I’m certainly not a royalist and I don’t even feel any strong affections to St Andrews (to be honest, I spent a lot of my time as a student avoiding the place – visiting friends in Glasgow or going back home to Edinburgh).
But that’s exactly puts me in a prime position to separate the royal facts from the oh-so-regal fiction. Here’s what Netflix managed to nail.
1. You’ll bump into the same people absolutely all of the time
In ‘The Crown’, William seems to bump into Kate a hell of a lot: at the library, in the swimming pool, in the historic St Salvator’s Quad. Coincidence? Magnetic attraction? Maybe, but it’s probably more likely to do with the fact that St Andrews is seriously small. It has a population of only 16,930, there are only three main streets in the town centre and it doesn’t even have its own train station. All of this makes it highly likely for you to bump into someone you necked off with the night before when you’re getting your hangover Diet Coke from Tesco.
2. People exclusively wear uni merch and Barbour jackets
For a reason not quite known to me, St Andrews students love a bit of branded merch (especially the baseball caps). The scene where Prince Andrew is going for a cliff side run in his St Andrews crested sweatshirt? Somewhat accurate to how students dress. The other characters in ‘The Crown’ who seemingly only wear riding boots and green Barbour hunting jackets? Also accurate. Although Will and Kate went to St Andrews in 2001, Tory chic was still very much ‘in’ when I graduated in 2020.
3. There isn’t really very much to do
In ‘The Crown’, you’ll notice the characters spend a hell of lot of the time hanging around in their rooms. That’s because there’s honestly not that much to do in St Andrews. There were no proper clubs, so just like in the series, people spent most of their time going to dinner parties, house parties and playing pool in the pub. Then there were the student-organised events: charity balls, charity polo matches and (see below) charity fashion shows. It’s not all posh stuff though. I found my fun by going clubbing in the nearby town of Dundee, throwing techno parties in barns and going to life drawing sessions at the student theatre.
4. There are ‘raunchy’ invite-only charity fashion shows
In episode nine, Meg Bellamy struts down the catwalk as Kate Middleton, wearing a risqué sheer dress while throwing William a seductive stare. The fashion show in question was ‘Don’t Walk’, which is very much real and is very much still one of the most-esteemed events on campus. Just like in ‘The Crown’, the hottest students are selected to model and you must know someone on ‘the committee’ in order to get an invite. What the show doesn’t show you, though, is that standard tickets would cost around £90 and you’d be lucky if you got a glass of prosecco in exchange (bragging rights were included, though). Tatler would often come along to cover the event and there would be charity auctions where students would drop eye-watering amounts of cash.
5. There’s a ‘raisin weekend’ where first years get covered in foam
This is very much a thing. ‘Raisin’ is one of the university’s longest running traditions and sees new students dressing up as something weird (I was a bag of jelly beans) and taking part in a huge foam fight. Unlike in ‘The Crown’, though, we weren’t allowed to sit on the steps of campus and drink afterwards: it was straight into the shower or (more likely) continuing
the celebrations at a house party.
6. You’ll meet a lot of Etonians
I didn’t personally come across a huge number of Etonians – but it’s no secret that St Andrews is home to a lot of private school kids. Just like in ‘The Crown’, a lot of them started their degree after spending a gap year volunteering at schools overseas. Then, there are the so-called ‘secret societies’ – elitest student social clubs, the most notorious being the Kate Kennedy Club. The Tab reported that there was one society which was so secretive that new members had to sign a £100,000 non-disclosure agreement to prevent any information leaking to the masses. Grim. But intriguing.
7. Students have to share dorms
This might not be too unusual in comparison to American colleges, but it’s quite a dated practice in the UK. I stayed in more modern halls with a bedroom to myself, but in ‘Sallies’ – the university halls where William and Kate lived in first year in ‘The Crown’ – and in the majority of the older halls, you had to share a room with a randomly assigned roommate. And yes, I have heard stories.
8. If you’re lucky, you’ll fall madly in love (with a prince)
For better or for worse, this didn’t happen to me. Dating at St Andrews was painful for a number of reasons. The place was so small that anyone you slept with had almost probably already slept with your mate. If you were a straight female, you were statistically at a disadvantage from meeting a guy (the undergrad population is 41 percent men and 58 percent women), let alone a nice, normal one. And if you were queer, you had to hedge your bets on the odd queer event thrown every other month because there were no gay venues in town. That said, though, I did make friends for life – and have seen more than a few wedding photos from couples who did meet at uni.