On Monday 14 January the Bata Reminiscence Centre based in East Tilbury library welcomed a group of 29 students and their lecturers from Brighton University.
Alicja Borkowska, senior lecturer, wrote a short summary of the visit:
All the students are 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate architecture students on the Architecture RIBA Part 1 BA(Hons) degree course at Brighton University. Every year the students are given a place to investigate and based on their research and findings they will propose hypothetical architectural proposals for the place.
This year the students have been asked to investigate the former factory town of Bata. We are particularly interested in the social aspect of the place and will be asking the students to re-imagine a new use for the factory buildings. The purpose of the visit was the show the students the factory and associated buildings and to give them as much insight as possible into how the place used to be and what it is like now. The Bata Reminiscence and Resource Centre has been invaluable in arranging a walking tour of the whole town, access into the factory buildings as well as providing archive access at the library and first hand accounts on what the place was like. We also plan that the students will return individually to the site to take further surveys and return to the library to get further information from the BRRC.
The project will run for 5 months (January – end of May 2013) resulting in an end of year degree show. We have loosely structured the year into 3 tasks, each student will propose a small architectural intervention, following with a larger look at the planning and structure of the town and ending with a smaller design proposal.
