News

The Great Hall Wins the RICS South East Award

We are delighted to announce that The Great Hall for Kent College, Canterbury has won the RICS Soical Impact Award (South East) in the Leisure Category.

The RICS Social Impact Awards are held each year to recognise outstanding projects that showcase excellence in regenerating, enhancing and transforming the built environment.

We are therefore extremely proud that The Great Hall has been recognised in this year's awards. We are delighted to share this good news and would like to say congratulations and thank you to everyone that was involved and worked on the project.

About the project:

The Great Hall opened in September 2019, and delivers Kent College a fantastic new facility which has become a focal point for school life and now serves as a key venue for Kent.

The new impressive and state of the art 600-seat auditorium, provides cutting-edge facilities for worship, concerts and the performing arts. It has been designed and built as a versatile and practical space that offers exceptional facilities for the school, allowing The Great Hall to host a cornucopia of superb concerts and theatrical performances from the school’s 5 choirs, 7 musical ensembles and talented drama department. Not only this but the Great Hall also offers these facilities to the wider community, as the building and the state-of-the-art facilities can be adapted to suit a variety of uses.

One of the key criteria at the proposal stage was to provide an assembly space for the whole school whilst also providing an intimate theatre space suitable for professional standard drama and music performances. These varying uses and scales of spaces were catered for by creating a flexible space that can be transformed to accommodate either. There is additional seating which is used during assembly periods but can then be stored away for theatre mode, which with use of a moveable partition creates additional foyer space. This flexible, efficient, layout also optimises the floor area and limits the footprint of the building.

Since it’s opening it has most notably been used as a key venue to host 4 events in support of ‘The Canterbury Festival’ in 2019, an independent charity bringing a mixture of performing arts from around the world, championing new talent. The partnership opened up a whole new world of opportunities for the performing Arts at Kent College and the community, both on stage and backstage. These opportunities included stage management, front of house and event management, as well as invaluable training and learning opportunities to attend professional rehearsals, lecturers, workshops and talks from visiting artists and festival staff for students, as well as invaluable experience of taking part in performances in front of live audiences. A great example is the event at the end of 2019, which involved over 300 children taking part in live performances to sell out audiences of 600 people.

The highly prominent location of the Great Hall on the site reflects the public and community significance of the building, providing good visibility and easy access to the high-quality facilities available to students at Kent College and the wider community. Through the significant investment by Kent College, the site is now a landmark building in Canterbury and is unique in Kent in that it provides a state-of-the-art modern theatre for both the School and the local community.