Havant Campus is HSDC’s A Level Centre of Excellence, and seeks to foster creativity and skills across the entire curriculum. A department that particularly embodies Havant’s commitment to this goal is textiles.
Through a combination of extracurricular trips, industry links and of course a strong practical curriculum that includes a major project in second year, Havant’s textiles department has been able to enrich the education of all its students.
A student showcases their outfit at the Green Week catwalk show.
Student Fashion Show
The Student Fashion Show held at Havant was a wonderful opportunity for students on the course to showcase their fantastic work in a real-world setting. This show was performed with the environment in mind, with the garments being made from recycled materials, some of which were donated by FatFace for students to customise.
University of Portsmouth Exhibition
Students on the course have also had the chance to experience higher education. A trip to the University of Portsmouth allowed Havant’s students to exhibit their work at the institution’s library, inspiring one student in particular to go on to study a degree in Fashion there.
Havant’s Railway 200 project.
Community Stitch
The past two academic years have seen incredible success for the course. In November 2024, second year textile students took part in a Community Stitch at Portsmouth’s D-Day Story Museum. This was a workshop led by textile designer Melanie Bowles from Stitch School, a company that seeks to give professional guidance on the benefits of embroidery to the local and wider community.
Railway 200
To mark the 200th anniversary of the modern railway, textile students at Havant were invited by the Watercress Line to take part in a Hampshire-wide project to produce a textile depiction of the history of rail travel. Havant’s students focused on 1829, the year that Robert Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ locomotive was invented.
This banner formed part of the student’s coursework project, and is currently on an 18 month-long tour of community venues across the county to celebrate the work of all the talented artists who were involved in its creation.
Extracurricular Trips
In addition to these enriching activities, students on the Havant textiles course are given the opportunity to embark on a variety of exciting extracurricular trips. For the past two years, textile students have been joined by other creative art courses on residentials to Amsterdam, allowing them to get a true sense of the culture of one of the most important cities in the history of art.
Domestically, Havant’s textile trips include visits to The Victoria and Albert Museum, Natural History Museum and the Science Museum in London, as well as trips to the Pitt Rivers Museum and The Ashmolean in Oxford. These were great opportunities for students to see some fantastic works of art, providing them with inspiration for their A Level projects.
These enriching opportunities are what make studying textiles at HSDC Havant such a great experience, as it is a course that truly embodies HSDC’s mission to take education beyond the classroom.
Find out more about studying textiles at Havant here: https://www.hsdc.ac.uk/courses/havant-campus/a-level/textiles/