Universities at Medway
13 July 2009
The Universities at Medway is a partnership between the universities of Greenwich, Kent, Canterbury Christ Church and Mid-Kent College. With SEEDA's help they have created a £50m campus at Chatham Maritime.
Medway is one of the largest urban areas in the South East. When Chatham Dockyard closed in 1984, Medway lost 7,000 jobs overnight and suffered serious economic decline.
In 1999 SEEDA took ownership of Chatham Maritime (a 340 acre site vacated by the Navy) and started developing the site to offer jobs, education, leisure and community facilities, plus housing.
At this time the higher education participation rate in the Medway, at 21%, was well below the regional average of 33%. The University of Greenwich had a small outreach operation on SEEDA's Chatham site but this was struggling to remain viable, while Mid Kent College had facilities nearby which were badly in need of upgrading and the University of Kent had begun to explore opportunities in the area. None of these institutions had the resources, or the breadth of academic capability, to create the kind of campus that the Medway area needed, so SEEDA was needed to bring all three together and set out what could be achieved.
We went on to provide land and investment worth £8.6m to fund the new ‘multiversity', and also helped to lever over £22m from partners to ensure the project would be a success. The partnership has now brought 6,000 students into the area (with a target to increase this to 10,000 by 2012), injecting £10m into the local economy each year. It has also seen brown-field land, derelict and disused for 20 years, regenerated to house state-of-the-art learning and leisure facilities, and the new graduates flooding the region are raising the local economy's skill levels, and attracting new employers to the Medway area.
The experience is now informing the development of multiversities elsewhere, such as those in Hastings.
For more information please contact our press office
Tel: 01483 470155
