Wye College

The College of St Gregory and St Martin at Wye, more commonly known as Wye College, was an educational institution in the small village of Wye, Kent, England, 60 miles (100 km) east of London in the North Downs area.

Founded in 1447 by John Kempe, the Archbishop of York, as a college for the training of priests, in 1894, the school moved to new premises, and the South Eastern Agricultural College was established in the buildings with Alfred Daniel Hall as principal. In 1898, Wye became a School of Agriculture within the University of London. Until 2005, Wye College was a well-known study and research centre in the fields of rural business and management, biological sciences, and the environment and agriculture. The college was officially closed by its then owner, Imperial College London, in September 2009.

Today, buildings that formerly housed Wye College have been repurposed as the Mind Campus in Withersdane Hall, a substance abuse rehabilitation clinic, and Wye School, a school for children of year seven and up. The main campus and several other buildings have been owned by Telareal Trillium since 2015 who are developing a masterplan involving some new housing.

The Wye campus developed from 1894 until 2000. It occupies a 3 km² estate, which includes a farm, managed woodland, and ancient grassland for agroecological research. These resources were augmented by glasshouses, climate-controlled growth rooms for plants and insects, and a containment facility for transgenic plants that supported laboratory-based research. There were dedicated laboratories for plant molecular biology, genomics and gene sequencing, electron microscopy, use of radiochemicals, microbiology, soil analysis, and plant/animal cell culture. Some of these lab facilities were removed by Imperial College. There were student halls and other buildings dotted around the village.

In 2000, Wye had students from 50 countries, 477 undergraduates, 259 MSc and PhD students, 200 on short courses, and an External Programme had 975 mid-career professionals registered from 120 different countries. Its numbers had peaked around 1995 but were sustained; the External Programme was growing Wye College lost its status as a College within the federal University of London and merged with Imperial and was renamed Imperial College at Wye. The reasons stated were a depression in the agricultural industry, affecting this small specialist institution, combined with a failure to grow student numbers sufficiently to support enough income to cover year-on-year cash outflows. Imperial agreed to keep agricultural teaching and research on the campus, although the social scientists and economists were relocated to London

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