Not always a college of arts
Our Millbank campus started out as the Royal Army Medical College, opened by the reigning monarch King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in May 1907. It was an international academic centre of excellence for military medicine for almost a century, until it closed in 1999. Famous for work on vaccines, it developed the vaccine for typhoid and for influenza at the time of the Spanish flu epidemic. During the second World War its work on developing the gas mask and other protection against chemical warfare meant it was heavily bombed. You can still see signs of the damage on the Tate gallery walls.
Chelsea College of Arts moved to Millbank in January 2005, converting the old military college into a multifunctional art school. Because of its historical importance (Grade II listed building) we had to respect and retain key features, which means many of your studies will happen in the grand rooms that were once the officers’ mess – the Banqueting Hall, Billiards Room and Card Room. Not many other art colleges have a parade ground or indeed a morgue (although rumour has it that no dead bodies were ever stored there) – now a great project space and gallery. The old college library was also preserved which you find at the heart of our library. And to this day, every last Friday of the month talks on military medical history are still given in the lecture theatre by the Friends of Millbank.
Chelsea School of Art had also already had a long and illustrious history. The first school opened in 1895 on Manresa Road and Chelsea Square. This is the area of London where many artists and craftsmen had moved into studios and workshops that were originally built for craftspeople working on The Great Exhibition of 1851.
At Millbank for the first time in the college’s history, all disciplines could be united on one site – giving students and staff an exciting new opportunity to mix and exchange ideas that continues up to today. We also have Tate Britain as a very special neighbour – you can find out more about its history and the history of the site we share on the Tate website.
The name Millbank comes from a mill which once sat on the bank of the Thames. But this area is most famous for the Millbank Penitentiary that opened in 1816, once England’s largest prison.
In 1843 the prison became a holding depot for convicts who had been sentenced to transportation in Australia, in the Henry Moore garden, you’ll find a bollard where the barges that carried the convicts to larger ships down the Thames were tied up. Some say the Australian nickname POMs for the British comes from Prisoners Of Millbank, although this is debated as another theory is it’s short for pomegranate due to Brits going bright red in the Australian sunshine. By 1867 when transportation ended around 162,000 men and women had been sent to Australia.
The prison finally closed in 1890 and the lengthy demolition process commenced two years later. The bricks from the prison were used to build Millbank Estate, just behind the college on John Islip Street, between 1897 and 1902 to provide social housing for 4,430 residents. Each of the 17 buildings in the development is named after a British painter.
In 1889 when Sir Henry Tate, an industrialist who had made his fortune as a sugar refiner, donated his collection of 65 British paintings to the National Gallery they were turned down because there wasn’t enough space to hang them. So Tate himself made a donation of £80,000 for the construction of a gallery now known as Tate Britain.
The gallery opened in 1897 and the Royal Army Medical College was built on the remaining vacant land on the site of the old prison.