Nuffield College was founded in 1937 after a donation to the University by car manufacturer Lord Nuffield. He gave land for the college, as well as £900,000 to build and endow it. The buildings are arranged around two quadrangles, with residential accommodation for students and fellows in one and the hall, library and administrative offices in the other. The chapel has stained glass windows designed by John Piper.
About Buildings of Nuffield College, Oxford in brief
Nuffield College was founded in 1937 after a donation to the University by car manufacturer Lord Nuffield. He gave land for the college, as well as £900,000 to build and endow it. The buildings are arranged around two quadrangles, with residential accommodation for students and fellows in one and the hall, library and administrative offices in the other. The chapel has stained glass windows designed by John Piper. The tower, which had been planned to be ornamental, was redesigned to hold the college’s library. It was the first tower built in Oxford for 200 years and is about 150 feet tall, including the flèche on top. Reaction to the architecture of the college has been largely unfavourable. In the 1960s, it was described as “Oxford’s biggest monument to barren reaction”. It has also been described as a “missed opportunity” to show that Oxford did not live “only in the past”. However, the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner thought that the tower helped the Oxford skyline and predicted it would “one day be loved”. In 1963, most of the remaining fortune did not reach the college as it was not needed to pay inheritance tax on Nuff yield’s estate. Administration of the University did not become the responsibility as the college was not part of the university. The college is now one of the most popular universities in the UK, with more than 100,000 students a year. It is located on New Road, to the west of the city centre near the mound of Oxford Castle, on the site of the largely disused basin of the Oxford Canal.
In 1937, The Times described the half-mile between the railway station and the city as ‘something between a refuse heap and a slum’; he had originally bought the canal basin to beautify that area before he had the idea of building a college to accomplish this. He was described in 1949 by an editorial in The Times as “the greatest benefactor of the. University since the Middle Ages’. He died in 1963, although most of his remaining fortune was not to be used as it did not need to be paid for by the University, although it did become the University’s responsibility as a result of his will. He left the college £100,000, which he approved for social science studies, but he was persuaded to put the remainder towards a science college instead. His plan was to create a special college that specialised in engineering and business methods to provide a link between academia and industry, for which he initially offered the University £1million. He later described the college as “where left-wingers study at my expense’, but was sufficiently pleased with it to leave it to the university when he died in 1997. The university has since become a leading centre for science and engineering education in the world. It also has a number of other centres of excellence, such as the University College of Music and the University of the Arts.
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