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Who feels welcome in university-level physics programmes, and why? Taking a sociomaterial orientation, we have investigated how space influences the way students become recognised and how they construct a sense of belonging in relation to space. Seven students in their first year of a five-year engineering physics programme agreed to participate in our study. They all took part in timeline interviews at the end of their first semester, and four of them participated in walking ethnographies at the end of their second semester. We asked the students to take us to places on the university campus that they found significant for their education. Afterwards, they created maps of these places and were interviewed about how they felt being there. A particular space, a corridor that serves as a transit area between buildings near the physics department, was recognised as important by all participants. They described it as a place where “all physicists” sit and study together. While this statement was not accurate, it highlights how this space makes some students visible among their peers. However, rather than being an entirely inclusive space for the physics community, one of our now-Swedish participants, David, was invisible there. Another participant, Alva, and her friends actively avoided recognition in this corridor, preferring to be “alone”. Our findings show that learning physics through studying in the corridor and gaining recognition are closely connected to the spatial and social configuration of activities.