Southlands College Deputy Head Nick Mayhew-Smith reflects on the recent lunch to mark the 150th anniversary of Southlands College, the first in a series of events marking this milestone.
Southlands College has marked the 150th anniversary of its foundation as a Methodist teacher training college with a celebratory lunch held on the exact date of its establishment, 26 February. A keynote speech by the Vice-President of the Methodist Conference, Barbara Easton, spoke of the college’s proud history as a pioneering place of learning for women that fulfils the Methodist desire for transform lives for the better, in practical as well as spiritual terms.
Southlands today is a constituent college of the University of Roehampton, situated just a few miles from its first site in Battersea. The university’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Jean-Noël Ezingeard welcomed guests with a speech stressing the college’s enduring legacy as a place of inclusion and diversity.
Dignitaries from Methodism, academia and the wider church and educational worlds gathered to celebrate the milestone event and to hear of plans for the college’s next 150 years. An appeal has been launched to raise funds for a redevelopment project that hopes to transform it into a place equipped for future generations of students, with spaces to gather and learn informally, better IT-equipped rooms and an enhanced landscape setting.
The college’s current site was built in 1997, and works hard to keep alive its church heritage. The chaplain Revd Nicola Morrison is based in a Methodist chapel by the entrance to the building, a visible presence that still helps shape the college’s values and ethos. The college is also home to the Southlands Methodist Trust and the Susanna Wesley Foundation, which fund research and practical action focused on issues of significance to the church and wider society.
In addition to the celebrations, the college named Barbara Easton and John Logan, a former Trustee of the Southlands Methodist Trust, as Fellows of Southlands College. Two new scholarships were also announced at the anniversary lunch for students studying at the university.
Dr Christopher Stephens, Head of College, describes the anniversary year as a chance to celebrate but also to look forwards: “Celebrating our foundation is an opportunity to reflect on the historic value of the Methodist Church’s mission in higher education and to consider how that mission can be relevant and important for our students today. As they look ahead to a challenging future, we hope that the underlying Methodist values espoused by Southlands College can help shape our students to be leaders in society committed to inclusivity, to social justice and to building a better world for us all.”
In keeping with this forward-looking approach, the Susanna Wesley Foundation is holding a major conference on 30 June entitled ‘Sustainability: sharing values, creating communities’. It will look at the environmental activities of church and faith communities, with speakers including Professor Alastair McIntosh and Professor Robert Beckford, both prolific authors and well-known advocates of social justice and change. Professor Molly Scott Cato, from the college’s Faculty of Business and Law, will also be talking about green economics, along with many other contributors.
The college has a long history as a Methodist place of education since its foundation in the 1872. It moved to Wimbledon Parkside in 1930, and accepted an ecumenical offer to build its current site on land owned by Digby Stuart College, at the time a Roman Catholic teacher training college. The institutions merged with two other colleges to become Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, which ultimately evolved into the University of Roehampton in 2004. The university has a population of around 9,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students studying across a diverse range of degree programmes. The majority of its students are from minority ethnic groups and are the first in their families to have attended university.
For further information about the college’s 150th anniversary see here.
