Eliot College, University of Kent

Happy Christmas to all Eliot students past and present. This was our College Christmas card in 2017, the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.

Yesterday I mentioned that the architect of Eliot College was Anthony Wade. There's a persistent story the architects of Eliot College also designed prisons! In one version Eliot was supposedly designed in such a way that if the University failed it could be converted into a prison! None of this is true. Anthony Wade was an accomplished architect who worked on a small number of quality projects during his tragically short life. His work includes a library at Canterbury Christ Church University, a church in Africa, a local church renovation, some quality social housing, and a few small commissions for individual houses and bungalows. However probably his most notable work, after Eliot of course, is Sanwood, a villa in the grounds of Geejam Hotel on Jamaica. The price of renting Sanwood starts at just $1500 a night, and the likes of Grace Jones and Banksy have stayed in it. There is a recording studio in the grounds so you have everything you need. Here's a taster.

60 years ago and the University of Kent's first undergraduates sit for dinner in Eliot great hall. This was followed by a welcome speech delivered by Dr Geoffrey Templeman, the University's first Vice-Chancellor, and Professor Whitehouse, first Master of Eliot College.

And more newspaper cuttings featuring the first day of the University of Kent on 11 October 1965. Students arrive in Eliot College.

More newspaper cuttings featuring the first day of the University of Kent on 11 October 1965. Ilona Davidson and Ruth Bundy, I met Ruth at a reunion.

Eliot College dining hall 60 years ago.

Today, 11 October, marks the 60th anniversary of the first undergraduates arriving at the University of Kent, almost 500 of them. In October 1965 the campus consisted mainly of Eliot College and the physics building that now houses Architecture.
The funds required to build the University came from the Queen, the funding bodies, Kent County Council and Canterbury City Council who put up £100,000 each, and hundreds of companies and individuals who generously put up the rest.

For funding reasons it was imperative for the campus to be up and running by autumn 1965. For this reason Eliot College was devised as a do it all structure., it housed, fed, educated and entertained those first 500 or so undergraduates, and some of the lecturers who lived in.

Eliot College was designed by Anthony Wade (brother of Wimbledon winner Virginia), a young architect who had studied under Louis Kahn in the US in the early 1960s. At the time Kahn was designing the Erdman Hall Dormitories at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Kahn’s bold plan featured three squares or blocks joined corner to corner in a line, an idea taken from a Scottish castle. The theory is that Wade took this idea and developed it, using four blocks joined corner to corner around a central cloister court. The building of Eliot began in spring 1964 and, due to the innovative use of precast concrete slabs delivered by lorry from the Midlands, it was completed by summer 1965. Incidentally the College is a good example of Brutalist architecture, the term coming from béton brut, French for raw concrete.