One of Britain’s oldest, most distinguished and idiosyncratic adult education colleges is looking for a new principal.

And rather than just advertising the post in the specialist educational press, Morley College’s governors also decided to announce the forthcoming vacancy in the arts and media pages of the newspapers.

It’s a decision that tells one something about the unusual nature of the college and the rare combination of qualities that any successor to the current incumbent, Bev Walters, needs to possess.

Experience of, or interest in, education, music and the arts is desirable. As is an open and consultative management style. A must, however, is the strategic vision to ensure that the college continues to be a centre of excellence in British adult education in future.

Tucked away in a rather nondescript area of south London, somewhere between the badlands of Waterloo Station and the Elephant and Castle, Morley College has been quietly getting on with what it does rather well since 1889.

It has been providing largely non-vocational education for adults from London and the south east from early in the morning to 10pm at night, six or seven days a week.

Historians, novelists and musicians - many household names - have studied and taught there. GM Trevelyan, Virginia Woolf, GE Moore and Margaret Drabble are among its former teachers.

Historically, the college’s strengths have included music (Vaughan Williams taught there, as did Gustav Holst and Michael Tippett), painting, print making and dance.

Morley dates back to the late 19th century when Emma Cons, a Victorian social reformer, took over a beer-sodden, rough house of a music hall, the Royal Victoria Hall - which housed the Old Vic theatre - and converted it into a temperance theatre where penny lectures also took place.

The classes for working men and women, in subjects unrelated to their trades, took place in the Old Vic’s dressing rooms.

They became so popular that it was not long before they spilled out of the dressing rooms into other parts of the building. In 1889, the college was formally organised as Morley College - so named after the financial support given by local MP and underwear manufacturer, Samuel Morley.

By 1924, the Royal Victoria Hall had become too small to house both the Old Vic and the college, so the latter moved to its present location, an 18th-century building, bombed out in 1940 and rebuilt in 1958.

When the Inner London Education Authority was abolished in 1990, most of London’s colleges went into local authority control but a handful, including Morley College, were directly funded by the Department for Education and Science via the London Residuary Body.

In the early 1990s there were fears that the non-vocational work of colleges such as Morley could be threatened by plans to create a new quango, the Further Education Funding Council, which was intended to support vocational further education and training.

In the event, such fears proved to be unfounded and under the 1992 FHE Act, which led to the incorporation of further education colleges, Morley, along with several other oddball institutions such as the Working Mens’ College, the City Literature Institute and the Northern College for Residential Adult Education, were defined as specialist designated institutions.

The Act gave the FEFC the responsibility to fund vocational courses identified in its second schedule. But it also gave the council the responsibility to fund liberal and adult education courses, defined as non-schedule 2 work, in this handful of designated colleges. Now, under the LSC, the distinction between schedule 2 and non-schedule 2 work has been abolished.

Today, Morley College is a limited company with charitable status. It receives some pound;5m annually from the Learning and Skills Council and has more part-time students than ever - 14,000 - many of whom are taking more than one class.

The college has a jewellery workshop, a glass-engraving workshop, a ceramics and pottery room, a full-sized theatre (described by the conductor Simon Rattle as the best orchestral practice space in London), a studio theatre and a former pub tconverted into an art gallery.

The English National Ballet Orchestra practises at the college two days a week. On Saturdays the college is home to the Centre for Young Musicians. Morley has also taught waves of Somalis, Ethiopians and Eastern Europeans.

When Mr Walters, principal for the past 12 years, was being interviewed in his college room recently, flamenco dancing was being energetically strutted down the hall in one dance studio, while the sound of opera singers practising arias elsewhere was clearly audible.

Maggie Hambling, meanwhile, was busy teaching painting and drawing above the former pub across the road, while print makers were hard at it one floor above her.

Sheila Browne, the former chief inspector of schools and sometime principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, happened to be visiting the college that day. She is chairman of Morley’s board of governors and clearly loves it for its unpretentious atmosphere and the opportunities it offers.

Mr Walters, who retires in the summer of 2003, says the college is trying to widen the range of work it does, increase the amount of basic skills education delivered and build in more progression routes.

“Learning how to learn is one of the things we do here,” he says.

From the penny lecture to penny-pinching chancellors of the Exchequer, Morley has managed to give adults a second chance in the classroom for more than 110 years.