Northampton College inaugurates brand-new esports arena

16 December 2021

We regularly write about developments in the world of esports in the UK, like McLaren's Shadow Project and Team Pacquiao teaming up with Veloce Esports, and a very interesting one has recently taken place in the East Midlands. Last month, Northampton College inaugurated its own state-of-the-art digital academy, including an entire esports arena, a first in the region. The academy was built in addition to the college's existing games design course and to further establish the region as a hub for games design and production.

A good time for esports in the UK

Esports in the UK are growing rapidly, and the industry is being taken more and more serious by investors, the media, and legislative bodies around the world. On top of that, numbers are starting to show that the acceleration of digital technologies and the evolution of esports have been one of the few positive things to come out of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. One of the goals of the new Northampton College academy is to tap into and support that rapid growth.
Stephen Ratcliffe-Jones, curriculum manager for media at Northampton College put it rather fittingly in saying that “the amount of games design and production companies that are popping up in Cambridge and Milton Keynes, and our students are going to be the next generation of people doing those jobs”. The principal of Northampton College, Pat Brennan-Barrett, referred to the opening of the new digital academy as “future-proofing the college”. At the same time, it helps to boost and bolster the world of esports in the UK, as specialised academies will be able to attract the best talent from all over the world.

The Northampton College digital academy

As we wrote earlier, Northampton College already offered a Bachelor's Degree in Games Design prior to the inauguration of their digital academy, which will serve as a complement to that study. At the new digital academy, student can study augmented reality, virtual reality, and of course, esports. This includes the first, fully equipped esports arena in the East Midlands area, which adds to the prestige and the credibility of esports in the UK as a whole as well.
Furthermore, the Northampton digital academy will boast a television studio, a fully-fitted suite for video editing, a studio for digital design, spaces for digital workshops, and various other specialist equipment and facilities. The project was partly funded by the South East Midlands Local Enterprise Partnership, a catalyst for economic growth across the South East Midlands, as they recognised the value of the arena and of esports in the UK as a whole. The organisation feels that Northampton College's digital arena can help them in their continuous work to stimulate growth, innovation, creativity, and the development of cutting-edge technologies in the area.