The Old Sommerville Building South Cheshire College 2007

 

The East Entrance Claremont Road, the old tower block with student row, shopping and resource centres.

The Mobile unit was used for the disabled, behind it and around to the left were the BTEC crafts and engineering workshops.

Danebank Demolition

 

The main campus comprised of a multi story tower block - the Danebank Center which was a landmark in crewe along with the Atos buiding and was used as a node of Cheshire country councils Microwave internet network until demolition began in 2009. It has had constant remodeling over the years, I was first there in 1983 when my father was refitting electrics and I had the run of the common rooms arcade machines for a day.

Summerville was abandoned first then the entire site leveled for a new £15 million building.

The entire affair probably has less to do with education and more to do with EU legislation making the old buildings unfit for use since they were designed with repair ability in mind rather than energy efficiency. Of course a big dollop of funding you had to spend had something to do with it !

 

The Summerville center at South Cheshire College was the adult education wing also comprising science labs, a Conference Center and the Hairdressers who kept style head models in their classroom windows exactly like a lost tribe of headhunters.

 

The student common room, meant of course as a common room, eventually over the years became a computer resource center which was bookable - a classroom in all but name. Much like the better equipped school library. Computers were standardized, ICL-Fujitsu P4 computers with 512 mb - 1Gb of memory running XP professional, there was an upgrade in 2007 where the entire schools stock was put into a container while the next gen dual core Fujitsu's replaced them, a big scramble ensued as schools around Cheshire demanded the desktops.

 

Part of the main building looking south, sorry about the flash photography, notice the metal single pane windows which are easy and cheap to replace with putty and light scaffold or  a hire scissor lift.

Directly in front are 2 computer labs on this level where we learned HTML.

Looking down is the main entrance to the hairdressers training center,

 

South Cheshire is one of the few places where there is an on site Daycare Center, I have met this at no other educational faculty especially Universities.

 

The all round car park facing South, East is the Conference center and Computer/Science labs,

an access road to the right went south to the main campus with parking on the tennis courts.

 

The main conference halls at Summerville 2nd floor right was the Common Room directly behind me as I shot the photograph was the Daycare Center, South is the main building and campus.

 

The Maintenence side of the Summerville center looking North/South on the north access road, you can see the air conditioner block and the chimney for the now gas fired heating.

Looking back you will find this to be the golden age of funding for education just before the bills arrive - the state has been dropping out of direct funding for decades. 

The New College Campus

    My time here was spending 2 years 3 days a week for the Diploma for Applied Computer science, where the College ran the first 2 years of the course for Manchester Metropolitan University, MMU was actually a pretty awful place to attend especially with the administration unable to process basic UCAS documents having the students who entered MMU from South Cheshire listed as first year undergraduates ignoring their Diplomas(and optional module choices, which in my case was a switch from databases to cybernetics which they considered too hard, I already had attended Reading University and took the module, for me it would have been pretty easy and got the 2.1 I was denied). Admin at SSC nothing short of excellent WINSIG.