After lying empty for over 20 years, it will not be long before the last remaining walls of the old Royal Mail sorting office are pulled to the ground. Its legacy, however, will live on, as Bristol University has revealed it will be building a number of drab ‘parcel-shaped’ towers to commemorate the demolition of the iconic building.

Pictures released to the press this week show that Bristol University plans to build three parcel-shaped buildings on the patch of land adjacent to Bristol Temple Meads train station, formerly known as Arena Island.

“The old sorting office will be sorely missed, but we want to make sure its presence still looms large over Temple Meads,” a spokesperson for Bristol University said at a press conference today.

“Given enough time, we truly believe these buildings will have as much impact on the landscape of Bristol as the old sorting office did, maybe more.”

The three box-shaped buildings, which have been designed to house up to 1 billion students, have already been playfully nicknamed ‘The Box’, ‘The Lever Arch File Wrapped In Brown Paper’ and ‘The Other Box’.

At a time when it seems the non-student population of the city is crying out for affordable housing, the university was keen to use this opportunity to stress the many benefits of building student housing over regular people housing:

“For the university, along with many other developers, the benefit of building accommodation for students is that, due to their poor diets, you can fit so many more of them into pokey little spaces. You can pack them in like sardines and they are too malnourished to complain.

“The other thing about students is, they are into all the latest trends, like frisbee and ‘happy slapping’ and many of them sit on bean bags. Actually, that’s more of an observation I have made. I’m sorry, what was the question again?”