Sadly, for Rochester, it did not succeed in its application to offer the DipAD, which sealed its fate in status terms for all of its remaining fifty years of existence. It was doomed to offer the often unpopular, space-hungry and, latterly, increasingly expensive practical and vocational subjects — product design, fashion and ceramics. Does anyone else remember ‘Display’? And so, while Maidstone and Canterbury, both as buildings and pedagogically, took their reference from the cloisters and courtyards of a university typology, Rochester referenced the factory as its model — albeit a modern, machine-age one, but essentially a site of functional and useful production.

The architecture at Rochester reflected all this. The building site was physically constrained, built into a steep hillside over the remains of the Napoleonic Fort Pitt, so here the subjects were stacked on top of one another around a deep internal courtyard, with studios and workshops arranged vertically and in close proximity. And here, as it was to turn out, it was much harder to hold the line and keep the subjects discrete and separate.

In addition to the amount of space allocated, not all spaces in the new College were equal in status or popularity, and this had a lot to do with the level of privacy they afforded their occupants.

The main entrance to the building at Rochester was somewhat curiously on the fourth floor, and also at the back. Apparently, this was the physical embodiment of a democratic and non-hierarchical educational architecture, combining modernist ideas from the archetypal Bauhaus with the liberal values of the 1960s, when the building was designed. So, despite the austere, factory-like exterior, the building’s programme was intended to be one of transparency and empowerment.

Once you succeeded in entering, which, due to the deliberately modest signage, was not a given, you found that you were in the middle of the building, with four floors beneath you, four above, and — out in front of you, over the heads of the so-called ‘administration’ — a long view across the Medway. The lower part of the building, by virtue of the lightwell, was largely inward-looking, with the studios across from each other in a panopticon arrangement, such that certain departments were kept under constant surveillance. Silhouetted figures moving about, operating machines and cutting garments, mixed confusingly with headless mannequins.

Added to this, the circulation through the building was not straightforward. The building was staggered in a way that meant floors did not fully line up vertically. This had the effect that, to get from the top to the bottom, there was a need to traverse some floors and studios to link up staircases and the passenger lift that only served the lower floors. Half-height walls divided the circulation routes from studios and crit spaces, and originally there were views down into spaces from above as well. All this meant that the spaces, particularly in the larger bottom half of the building, were both physically and visually permeable, semi-public, with the activities contained within them clearly in view.

This approach, however, did not extend to the top of the building; the seventh and eighth floors were quite different. These floors were both the smallest and the most enclosed. The College’s main circulation routes did not reach them; there was no lift, and there was no need to pass through on the way to anywhere else. There were no windows at the top of the building, internal or external. While the method and material of the photograph are light, the materiality of the Photography department was solid and opaque.

“The Photography department was an outlier and used this to its advantage. It occupied a separate, unassailable space, which in turn attracted outliers and mavericks.”

Between the Photography department and the rest of the College was the library. Placed above the entrance floor, this repository of theoretical ideas and references was the highest point that many students and staff ever reached. It was also home to CASS, or Contextual and Supporting Studies, an independent department with strong political views, a remnant of earlier times when the written word had to be kept separate from the practice of creative subjects. This was the theory zone, and what happened above it was quite different in approach to what was happening elsewhere in the building, where making skills were the dominant driver for the production of physical objects.

Up here, behind the solid walls of the double-height studios and revolving lightfast doors of the darkrooms, practices were largely unseen and private. This was where ideas dominated, and where the rules of the College could be broken. It was the site of the radicals and the revolutionaries, who, undetected, challenged the status quo and aimed to change the world through their persuasive stories and images. The spaces were deliberately specific: they did not lend themselves easily to being repurposed; the floors were not strong enough for heavy machines; and the improvements made by successive department heads ensured it was ever thus.

It would not be too much to say that the Photography department saw itself as quite literally above everyone else. Its geography contributed to the impression that it was out of bounds to everyone except its own staff and students, and that the work they were engaged in was somehow of a higher order. By rights, it should have moved to Maidstone when the Kent Institute of Art and Design was formed and the subjects divided up equally across the county to avoid internal competition, but this department had fought hard to remain independent, and as such had had to learn to define itself as different. If it had been moved, Visual Communication, the biggest School of them all, would have swallowed up this relatively tiny department; it would have become merely a pathway, or worse, an ‘optional unit’, a fate to be avoided at all costs. Keeping its spaces out of sight and its practices secret was as necessary for survival as the secrecy of a medieval guild. So, while the staff and students did not embrace the vocational ethos of Rochester, remaining there was imperative, and required the department to use its position in the building in the service of creating difference and mystery, fostering its perceived ‘otherness’.

And from this sense of separation emerged a distinctive and close-knit community with a point to prove and a sense of self-belief that provided the essential conditions for ambitious and often exceptional work. This is not to say that other departments did not produce exceptional work, simply that spatial and political conditions help define the character of a practice and its people. They mirror each other in an iterative representation, reinforcing and supporting the development of a distinctive identity. The Photography department was an outlier and used this to its advantage. It occupied a separate, unassailable space, which in turn attracted outliers and mavericks, and enabled the development of a narrative of difference around which people were able to coalesce, creating buy-in.

“Space is not incidental to creative practice.”

Space is not incidental to creative practice. Whether real or virtual, it conditions what is possible, framing and defining physical and intellectual territories. Art school space wars may at first seem incidental, but securing spaces and resources is fundamental to the nature of the practices that can be developed. That these spaces are distinctive and defendable builds a shared sense of identity and purpose amongst students and staff who come together for relatively short periods of time and need to achieve a great deal.

According to David Haste¹, former Head of School of Fine Art at the Kent Institute of Art and Design, there were once 24 art colleges in Kent. Now there is only one. Kent is quite unusual from an education perspective, being one of the few English counties still to operate the grammar school system of secondary education. Forty per cent of young people in Kent attend grammar schools, which, whatever your view on the pros and cons, must make it evident that the other 60 per cent are disadvantaged by the policies that have privileged academic subjects over vocational ones, exams over projects, and scientific method over creative practice.

The demise of the British art school, as a driver of innovation, international reputation and major economic contribution, is often lamented. In Kent, the local art schools provided a doorway to education and agency, actual safe spaces to test boundaries and experiment. They were buildings full of and about ideas, whose structures mirrored their times.

Francine Norris | May 2026

Francine Norris began working at Rochester College in 1994 as a part-time tutor in Spatial Design. Over the next two decades, she took on a range of teaching and management roles, becoming Dean of Faculty in 2009 after the College became part of the University for the Creative Arts. Francine’s time at Rochester sparked her ongoing research interest in the relationship between the architecture of studio and workshop spaces and the practices that develop within them. This interest continued to inform her work in her most recent role as Principal at West Dean College in Sussex, a specialist provider of practice-based craft education.


¹ Haste, D. The Art Schools of Kent: A Complete History, 2013, Werter Press.