Partnerships

The Slade School of Fine Art

Our Visual Arts students benefit from collaborations with local arts organisations as well as the Slade School of Fine Art in London. West Dean College hosts visiting artists on a regular basis, offering periods of residency from four to eighteen weeks and a series of student exchanges with the London-based art school began in 2005.

Building on the success of our exchange programme with the Slade, recent collaborative projects have been developed between West Dean College and the Royal College of Art in London, University College Falmouth in Cornwall and Ruskin College in Oxford.

BADA – The British Antique Dealers’ Association

Conservation Studies students benefit from our close relationship with the British Antique Dealers’ Association (BADA). The Association helped set up the first conservation programmes at West Dean and continues to provide invaluable support and assistance in the form of programme advisers, an annual scholarship, work placements and objects on which students can work.

University College London, School of Archaeology

Each year students from UCL’s School of Archaeology carry out investigations within the 6,400 acre West Dean Estate, which has everything from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic flint scatters to the industrial archaeology of a dismantled railway line. This diversity makes it an ideal location for their students to gain a grounding in survey skills, excavation methods and environmental studies.

The students spend between four-days and two-weeks on the West Dean Estate, deepening their appreciation of ancient technologies and the remains that are produced from different activities. This facilitates a greater understanding of how land occupation and use has changed over the centuries. The Estate features Bronze Age burial mounds, Iron Age enclosures and the remains of Roman villas and Medieval churches.