History
The college has been delivering vocational education in Medway and Maidstone for nearly 100 years. Its roots lie in the technical institutes established within the Medway towns in the 1890s and Maidstone around 1918.
The college first began delivering courses from the Horsted Centre in Chatham in 1954. The site was opened as Medway College of Technology by the Duke of Edinburgh on 5 April the following year.
Medway College of Technology and Maidstone Technical College amalgamated in 1966 to become Medway and Maidstone College of Technology. The purpose-built City Way site in Rochester was subsequently opened as an additional college site in 1968.
The college changed its name to Mid-Kent College of Higher and Further Education in 1978, before dropping the hyphen and space and the latter part of its title to become MidKent College in October 2008.
Throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the college's students were famed for their Rag Day parade. This saw them conducting a carnival procession through the Medway Towns. The parade started at Gillingham train station and ended at the esplanade in Rochester. Each year the students elected their own "Rag Day Queen" to head the procession.
Read more about this topic: Mid Kent College
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)