Welcome to the Warsash Maritime School, and to our St Mary’s campus - the home of officer cadet training at Solent!
Phases one, three and five of your maritime academic education programme will be based at St Mary's, but you'll also complete practical and simulation courses at our safety training centre at the Warsash campus and in our maritime simulation centre at the East Park Terrace campus.
Cadet education at St Mary’s campus
Our St Mary’s campus is based at City College in the city centre and is a modern teaching environment for cadets' academic studies. Here, you'll find a reception and cadet administration area, staff offices, teaching rooms, social break-out area, private study spaces, chart rooms and ECDIS suites, as well as facilities for some of the practical elements of your deck or engineering programme, including:
- Engineering workshop with extensive machinery facilities, welding units, and specialist control laboratories for electronics systems and thermodynamics, mechanical and control experiments.
- Seamanship centre with equipment for practical seamanship to efficient deck hand standard.
Warsash cadets can also use City College’s student canteen facilities for breakfast, lunch and refreshments. Alternatively, there are plenty of local shops on St Mary’s Street including Tesco Express, coffee shops and various food outlets, and you're only a short walk from the main shopping centre itself.
East Park Terrace campus
Solent's East Park Terrace (EPT) campus is just a 15-minute walk from St Mary’s, and here you can take full advantage of all the facilities on offer: sports complex, Student Union events, IT resource suites, and food outlets and cafés. The library also has extensive nautical reference material for your studies.
The East Park Terrace campus is also home to the maritime simulation centre, the UK’s largest ship and port simulation centre with eight full-mission bridges, a full-mission engine and high voltage simulator, four multi-purpose desk simulation classrooms, and two GMDSS radio communication suites.
Safety training centre at the Warsash campus
All your practical safety training courses are held at our waterside campus at Warsash, which is around 11 miles from Southampton. This includes all your mandatory basic and advanced STCW courses in fire fighting, maritime safety, offshore survival and medical certification. The facilities at the safety training centre include:
- Survival craft facilities, including a purpose-built pier head to launch and recover life boats, fast rescue boats and rigid inflatables. There's also a pool facility for personal survival techniques and offshore oil and gas helicopter underwater escape training.
- Fire school, a realistic environment to learn vital techniques of fighting fires at sea. It contains a three-storey steel unit for live fire training, breathing apparatus, a fire pit, fire screen, and other devices for simulating fire, as well as classrooms for theory.
All courses at the safety training centre include lunch at the on-site Dock restaurant. If you want to venture into Warsash village to the local food shops, it's only a 10 minute walk. And to get you from and to St Mary's for your training, there's an inter-campus bus.
As part of the University’s investment into our maritime facilities, the centre is undergoing an extensive update with new equipment and buildings.
Accommodation
The University's David Moxon student residence is the closest residence to the St Mary’s campus and a short walk to the main East Park Terrace campus. The residence is reserved for Warsash cadets and offers single study-bedrooms with en suite, and fully-equipped kitchen-diners. All student residence have WiFi.
Officer cadet support
We have a dedicated cadet liaison coordinator based at St Mary’s and an email address wsmse.admin@solent.ac.uk should you have any questions and enquiries.
