Located on a wooded hillside overlooking the beautiful cathedral city of Winchester, King Alfred’s College was founded in 1840 and today is home to over 5,000 full and part-time students. The fastest growing area of work is in Performing Arts, and the college has made substantial investments in its core infrastructure in recent years. Seven years ago, land was bought to develop the West Downs Student village. To satisfy the need for extra teaching space for performing arts, the College restored the old West Downs Preparatory School, a Grade 2 listed building. This enabled the College to create three new performance areas and eleven seminar rooms, as well as a 300-seat theatre and arts centre. The project also involved the provision and installation of new lighting and audio systems that could be adapted to meet the diverse needs of the performing arts courses, student societies and conferences. Dan Neagle, Senior Theatre Technician and Andy Clancy, theatre technician at the College brought in AC Lighting to advise on suitable equipment to meet the technical and budgetary requirements of the project. There followed a period of site visits and consultation to agree final specifications. This included dealing with the difficulties of carrying out a complex installation within the constraints imposed by a listed building.The final installation included a wide range of lighting control equipment including MX24 and 300 Series lighting consoles from Strand, and an 86 x 3kW ETC Sensor dimmer system. Luminaires included Strand Cantata 1200W fresnels, Strand Quartet 650W Fresnels, Strand Coda Cyc Floods, ETC Source 4 Junior Zoom Profiles, ETC Source 4 Pars, Martin MAC 250s, Clay Paky Miniscan HPEs, and Thomas Par 64’s fitted with Chroma-Q colour changers. The audio equipment included Turbosound TCS and THL loudspeakers, Allen & Heath audio mixers, QSC amplifiers, BSS equalisers and crossovers, and Drawmer compressors.
