SOUTHAMPTON Solent University is celebrating its 10th anniversary, having earned university status in 2005.

Yet it has had a long history of providing education to the people of Southampton and its surrounding region.

Towards the end of the Second World War, in 1943, the Ministry of Education opened a junior technical school for building in the Eastern District School in Southampton’s Albert Road, teaching the necessary trades the bomb-shattered town would need in order to rebuild.

That same year also saw the introduction of a pre-nursing school for girls, which was started in temporary huts on Southampton Common, before a school of bakery was opened in a corrugated steel Nissen hut at Swaythling some two years later.

In the late 40s these vocational training schools were brought together with technical courses being spun off from the University College of Southampton, which would itself receive university status and become the University of Southampton in 1952.

The resulting Southampton Technical College started teaching in a former St Mary’s workhouse in 1949. Post-war austerity – and a lack of construction materials – meant that plans for “a fine building in East Park Terrace” were still just a dream.

That dream began to be realised in 1961 and the student population at East Park Terrace expanded rapidly. In 1969 the college split, with senior and advanced courses delivered by the College of Technology in East Park Terrace, while the junior courses moved back to the St Mary Street site under the name of Southampton Technical College, eventually becoming today’s Southampton City College.

Southampton Technical College merged with its East Park Terrace neighbour, the College of Art, in 1978. The oldest of the institutions making up Solent University, the College of Art was originally founded as an art school in 1856, in the Victoria Rooms where West Quay now stands.

As it grew in popularity the art school moved to larger and larger premises, including the Philharmonic Hall on Above Bar, former site of Odeon cinema and currently home to nightclub Switch.

Following a tragic 1940 bombing raid which killed three staff and 15 students the school was evacuated to Winchester in 1941, returning in 1945 to premises in Southampton’s Marsh Lane – near to where Southampton Solent University’s Deanery and Chantry halls exist today – before finally settling in East Part Terrace in 1974.

The merger of the art and technology colleges formed Southampton College of Higher Education, and in 1984 the School of Navigation at Warsash followed suit – leading to the creation of Southampton Institute of Higher Education, and setting the scene for the 2005 transformation into today’s modern university.