Canterbury College Plans

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25364, 11 December 1947, Page 6

Canterbury College Plans

In the announcement reported yesterday, the Minister of Education, Mr T. H. McCombs, gave the Canterbury University College Council the assurance it has for some time sought—that it could safely commit itself to a long-range building and rebuilding policy designed to make full use of the present college site and of an adequate adjacent area. The aria in view was the block immediately to the north of the college, which already owns, and uses, the western end of it. The assurance is an essential one. No conceivable programme of new building and rebuilding confined to the present block can provide the accommodation that is now required,

' provide rationally for expansion, and satisfy either the architect’s or the citizen’s demand for good individual design of the buildings and for good total design. But the college unquestionably faces the need to develop a very long programme of building indeed. Its lest permanent building was put up about 30 years ago. Its full resources af permanent buildings are barely enough to accommodate—badly— a student body of 1000 or 1200 and a staff in inadequate proportion. That student roll has doubled and the staff doubled, or more than doubled, in 10 years; and though the post-war tide is receding a little and may recede a little further, it would be a foolish governuig authority which, planning now, failed to plan for a roll which will steady not much below 2000 and decade by decade will climb again. The college council has made no such error. It has clearly recognised that it must either have at least twice its present space at the centre or else abandon the centre for a new site elsewhere. And no new permanent building, obviously, ought to be designed and sited and built on the present college block, unless as the first unit of an assured plan covering the larger area. The assurance, necessary for those reasons, was also quite fairly asked for from the Government, because the Education Department itself had strongly urged the council to make its long-range plans for an enlarged central site; and the .academic and civic and architectural advantages of planning for central development, given space enough, are overwhelming. The, Minister’s announcement means that the college may now develop its plans in confidence. (It is to be hoped that it also means that a date may soon be fixed for the letting of a contract for the chemistry block, the college’s first building priority, on the present site.) It means, of course, that sooner or later, and by stages, what are now residential properties on the block defined in the Minister’s announcement will have to be bought by the Crown for the college. It will be extraordinary if every owner concerned readily accepts the situation and no inconvenience is suffered, no difficulty, no vexation, no hardship. There is this to be said, however: what is certain to be long notice, in present conditions, has been given. It is to be hoped, and expected, that this will help to minimise and ease the difficulties of a situation which planned urban development inevitably produces, from time to time, and that the college and the Government will resolve them resourcefully.