The visiting students are studying in the MArch Studio I teach with Dr David Knight at the School of Architecture, Technology and Engineering, University of Brighton. Each year the studio focuses on a theme and explores this through a specific place, sometimes a town and sometimes an area or region. The location acts as a focus for the studio’s collective research as well as a site for individual design proiects. This year’s studio is called Change of Use and Dover is our site. We are currently researching the town and a number of sites that are currently unused or in the process of being redeveloped. The term Change of Use applies as much to the town as to the specific sites so that we are interested in understanding Dover’s place in the world, how it might develop in the future and how it relates to its own history. Dover has a problematic relationship to its history. To a large extent it is defined by it and by the defensive and infrastuctural developments that reflects its strategic historic role. And yet it is also missing much of its history which has disappeared through a combination of redevelopment, intensive second world war bombing, post war rebuilding and subsequent redundancy and neglect. The question at the heart of the studios’ endeavour is: How does Dover reinvent itself for the future? Change of Use also reflects an ecological agenda and an urgent need to avoid the wasteful cycle of construction and demolition and instead a desire to work with existing structures, buildings and spaces.  Charles Holland