The campus has been steadily developed since it opened in the 1960s, and recently expanded into the site of the old Canterbury Prison, striving to maintain a balance between creating a modern teaching environment and biodiverse and welcoming open green spaces. This careful management has enabled a bustling university campus to contain areas of absolute tranquillity just a few hundred metres from the busy city centre.

Explore our Wilder Campus

Although sustainability is a key factor in all of the University's operations, there are some locations on campus that have been created and curated with sustainability goals in mind. You can see all of these at a glance and read a little about them with our Wilder Campus Map or learn more about each project below.

Johnson Wellbeing Garden

Johnson Wellbeing Garden is a biodiverse community garden for growing, meeting, relaxing and connecting with nature, where staff and students can relax in a tranquil outdoor setting. The garden (accessed via a path to the right of the main Johnson entrance, or for step-free access, through the Johnson building itself) has been used for team building, meditation, small events, for classes and for and meetings relating to sustainability and permaculture and more. It is cared for by the Academy for Sustainable Futures team, and tended during weekly 'Potter and Prune' sessions, which staff and students are invited to join. It is home to several mini-allotments, a hedgehog house, bird and bat boxes and a small pond teeming with life. We have a series of friendly, informal videos that follow our journey developing and maintaining this space during and after lockdown saw it reclaimed almost entirely by nature.

Diamond Jubilee Gardens

The lower courtyard garden in Erasmus and the upper gardens that reach onto the roofs above it were redeveloped and relaunched during our Diamond Jubilee year as spaces for biodiversity, community and relaxation. Two pergolas were built in the upper gardens as a quiet, communal space for staff, students and nature to share, overlooking the courtyard garden below, with a rockery planned in future.

In the lower gardens, staff and students gathered to plant fruit tree saplings, herbs, vegetables and flowers designed to attract pollinator insects and enhance biodiversity in the courtyard garden, which staff in nearby offices will continue to tend and harvest across the seasons.

Erasmus has been a key building on campus since it was first built in 1968 and, for some years, it housed Christ Church’s Student Union. The refurbishment of the gardens aimed to create more attractive and enjoyable practical communal spaces for staff and students connect, relax, grow and harvest together, and to encourage the use of these previously underused areas.

Queen's Green Canopy

Staff and students planted more than 400 native saplings in the spring of 2022, as part of the celebrations for Her Majesty the Queen's Platinum Jubilee. The saplings will grow to form a hedgerow along the upper bank of the Verena Holmes with our second hop garden tucked just behind, following an ancient ley line that links together the heritage sites that comprise the grounds of the Canterbury UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS), of which our campus is a part.

Hedging is a vital component in encouraging more birds, insects and other wildlife onto campus, and the saplings will make a substantial contribution to the ecology of the spaces surrounding the newly built Verena Holmes STEM Building.

International Forest

Led by the International office, international student ambassadors and international students from across the University, a long bank along the edge of our Stodmarsh playing fields is being transformed over time into an International Forest.

International students are invited periodically to come and plant a sapling there as a legacy of their time studying with us and as a celebration of our multicultural, global community, enhancing biodiversity, and capturing carbon from the atmosphere along the way.

Hop Gardens

One of our best-loved green heritage projects, our hop gardens are a celebration of our unique 'sense of place'. The oldest is tucked behind the Fleming buildings, while a second, younger hop garden is being established next to the Verena Holmes Building. These areas have been planted with  four types of heritage hops: Canterbury Whitebine; Early Prolific; Bramling Cross and East Kent Goldings, some of which are specific to this local region. Each year students and staff harvest the hops by hand, which are blessed and carried down through the city where they are brewed into a green hop ale in collaboration with a local brewery. Each year, the ale is renamed, rebranded and the label redesigned by Christ Church students and staff as part of one of our module collaborations.

Abbey Walk Vineyard

Flanking St Augustine's Abbey and the Old Sessions House, this small vineyard took inspiration from the success of our hop gardens and is planted with grapes. It is a celebration of our green heritage: the monastic history of our campus grounds, planted with the aspiration that in time we will be able to create wine to go with our annual CCCU heritage ale.

Becket Dragons

The dragons in Becket garden took inspiration from the medieval dragons discovered in the stonework of St Augustine’s Abbey, and were designed and hand-crafted by staff and students between the summer of 2022 and the spring of 2023 to represent climate change in our world. This project, led by Dr Diane Heath from the Centre for Kent History and Heritage, aimed to explore how learning about and working to address the climate emergency can be made accessible to children.

The medieval dragons were built using sustainable materials, including second-hand rubble and natural clay. Finally, sedum and local mosses were transplanted onto the sculptures to encourage growth, so they will act as a carbon capture structure for our future. 

Golden Jubilee Orchard

This little orchard (between Ramsey, Powell and Laud) was planted as part of our Golden Jubilee year celebrations in 2012 with Kentish varieties of heritage apples and cobnuts  echoing the orchards that were tended by medieval monks on this site. The orchard has been enhanced by further wildflower planting and seed sewing and makes use of natural fallen-log style benches so that the biodiversity and peace of this small pocket of heritage green space can be enjoyed by staff, students and visitors.

Coleridge Garden

This mature, cultivated garden is a peaceful communal green space on campus close by our historic Brew-Bakehouse Wall with three points of heritage interest. It is home to a Romani caravan, known as a vardo, constructed circa 1908, to a heritage mulberry tree that is around fifty years old, and a Tradescant Memorial larch tree, planted to commemorate renowned gardener John Tradescant the Elder. Tradescant came to Canterbury in the early 1600s and was responsible for laying out extensive gardens in the Abbey precincts, including orchards, fragrant flowers and groves from 1615 to 1623, and for introducing a number of specimens and cultivars to the UK from his travels abroad, including the larch.

Olive Grove

In a courtyard in the centre of Laud is the Olive Grove, a pocket garden tucked away in the heart of campus designed as a low-maintenance, drought-resistant and sheltered community space, home to olive trees and hardy, fragrant plants such as lavender and rosemary. The pathways that curve across it were designed to be reminiscent of our CCCU triquetra logo.

Roundhouse

The roundhouse was designed by members of the University of Kent’s School of Anthropology and Conservation, utilising sweet chestnut timbers from their ancient campus woodland, and was generously donated to the Academy for Sustainable Futures. It is a collaborative community space for outdoor learning, socialising and events.

Yurt

The yurt is a sustainably sourced, temporary outdoor learning and recreation space that moves around campus as needs dictate. Its usual home is on Anselm lawn during the warmer months where it is often used as a pop-up event space and filled with comfortable over-sized bean-bag cushions; it is usually taken down over the winter and re-erected in the Spring, and is available for anyone to use and enjoy.

Choughs over the White Cliffs Mural

This mural, painted by local artist Greg Stobbs, celebrates the reintroduction of the red-billed chough to its natural habitat at Kent’s chalk cliffs by Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust with support from CCCU’s research community. The chough features on both the University and Canterbury coats of arms, adopted from the crest attributed to the murdered Archbishop, St Thomas Becket.

Food Composter

The Ridan Pro composter that lives by Gate 4 was acquired and installed as a joint project by the University and Students' Union as part of their Responsible Futures partnership. It is a hot, aerobic constant throughput composter, which is capable of dealing with all types of food waste and bio-degradable green waste on-site. Much of the University's waste food from our food outlets is fed into our food composter, which is turned regularly by staff and student volunteers. The resulting compost has been used in the Johnson Wellbeing Garden and the Hop Gardens, and some compost has also been donated to external community projects.

Wildflower Banks

There are several wildflower banks planted across our Canterbury Campus, particularly along the outer walls, behind Fleming, Hepworth and Becket and interspersed with other sustainability spaces such as the Jubilee Orchard and Abbey Walk Vineyard. These wildflower areas promote biodiversity and provide valuable resources and habitats for local pollinators and all manner of small insects and wildlife. 

Brew-Bakehouse Wall

This Grade II listed, scheduled monument is all that remains above-ground of a brew-bakehouse likely built in the late 1200s that was once part of the ancient St Augustine’s Abbey grounds. This western wall is a part of the Canterbury UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) which includes a portion of our campus grounds, St Martin's Church, St Augustine's Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral. It has inspired several green heritage projects at CCCU, including our hop gardens, clay bread oven and our Golden Jubilee heritage orchard.

St Gregory's Church

This church, situated across the road from Gate 1, is not only home to our Music Centre but also to two of seven 19th century 'baobab' plane trees in Canterbury which form a cross spanning two and a half miles of the city when viewed from above.

St Martin's Priory

The original site of the CCCU teaching school founded in 1962, St Martin's Priory at the top of North Holmes Road is surrounded by beautiful, cultivated gardens that include a rose garden and grass labyrinth, and sits alongside the historic St Martin's Church, once the private chapel of Queen Bertha around the time of St Augustine's mission to Canterbury. It is the oldest parish church in the English-speaking world, and forms part of the Canterbury UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) along with the abbey, the cathedral and part of our campus including the Brew-Bakehouse Wall.