95–101: Rhodes Building, Oriel College
Oriel College's Rhodes Building of 1911 was designed by Basil Champneys and built by John Wooldridge and George William Simpson of Frenchay Road. It is Grade II* listed (1046662).
It was paid for by a bequest of Cecil Rhodes, who had been an undergraduate at Oriel. It occupies the whole site between Magpie Lane (formerly Grove Street) and Oriel Street. The college cleared the site by demolishing the seven houses (with shops on the ground floor) at 95–101 High Street. It was opened by the Provost of Oriel, Dr Charles Lancelot Shadwell, on 28 September 1911 (see photographs in the Oxford Journal Illustrated of 4 October 1911).
There is a statue of Cecil Rhodes (above) high up over the central doorway of this building, and an independent commission set up in June 2020 has recommended its removal: more details on this page.
There are six other life-size statues on this building, sculpted in Portland stone by Henry Alfred Pegram. The two shown above each side of the window below Rhodes are of King Edward VII and King George V, chosen because the former died and the latter came to the throne in the year the building was being erected (1910). The other four are former heads of the college: Cardinal William Allen (1532–94, Fellow 1550, Principal of St Mary's Hall); Walter Hart or Lyhert (Provost 1435–46), John Hales (Provost 1446–9); and Henry Sampson (Provost 1449–76). All seven statues are pictured here.
The inscription under the central statue of Rhodes reads: E:LARGA:MVNIFICENTIA / CAECILII:RHODES. As well as acknowledging Cecil Rhodes’ munificence, the large letters in that inscription are a complicated chronogram which, when shuffled, gives the date of the building, MDCCCLLVIIIIII. (Normally the date 1911 in roman numerals would be the much neater MCMXI.)
This building was not generally regarded as an improvement to the street:
- Soon after its completion in 1911, Oriel College's Treasurer L. L. Price noted “most people would I think agree that the compromise … is unpleasant”.
- In his memoirs of 1927, W. E. Sherwood wrote that Oriel had “broken out into the High, … destroying a most picturesque group of old houses in so doing, and, to put it gently, hardly compensating us for their removal.”
- In 1930 Evelyn Waugh went further and suggested blowing the building up.
- In 1965 James/Jan Morris wrote in Oxford: “If you are very old indeed, you are probably still fuming about the façade built in the High Street by Oriel College in 1909, which most of us scarcely notice nowadays, but used to be thought an absolute outrage.”
See Edward Impey, “The Rhodes Building at Oriel, 1904–2011: Dynamite or Designate?”, Oxoniensia 76 (2011), 95–104
(online here as a PDF).
The seven shops on this site that were demolished
The row of seven shops that this building replaced were all in the parish of St Mary-the-Virgin. The above photograph shows them in 1910: several of the shops have a sign in the window saying “PREMISES COMING DOWN”. From left to right they are:
- No. 95, the tall, four-storey, narrow shop on the corner of Magpie Lane, with BATES & CO over the door
- No. 96, a wider, shorter three-storey building the width of four sash windows, with the name of the cutler F. T. LONG over the door and window of the first two bays.
- Then there is another doorway labelled 96½, leading to the university lodgings upstairs, and to the right of that doorway there is narrow shop window presumably belonging to Long the cutler with FUJIYA advertised over it: this appears to be a type of cutlery
- No. 97, a taller, four-storey building just one window wide, marked Hedderly, a tobacconist & cricketing outfitters
- No. 98, a shorter shop, two bay windows wide, also marked Hedderly
- No. 99, a narrow shop, just one window wide: this was Mrs Davis's ecclesiastical warehouse, but the sign is hard to read. On the first floor is a sign for the Perth Dye Works.
- No. 100 & 101, a large four-storeyed building, two bay windows wide, on the corner of Oriel Street. This is divided into separate shops: on the left at No. 100 is SAUNDERS, an optician, and on the right at No. 101 is SOAME, the photographer and picture frame maker. On the first floor of the latter is James Langley, solicitor & commissioner for oaths, with his details painted on the window: two men are looking out of this window at the photographer.
There is a similar photograph by Henry Taunt of this row of houses.
The shops on this site between 1772 and 1910
The 1772 Survey of Oxford shows that the seven shops on this site were occupied as follows: Craddock (95), Morton (96), Court (97), Buck (98), Bayne (99), Johnson (100), and King (101). James Woodforde records how on 13 February 1776 he paid Bayne[s] 0 : 2 : 6 for a new razor.
The extract from an Oriel College plan of 1814 below shows the seven shops between Oriel Street (left) and Magpie Lane (right) and their occupiers at that date, namely (right to left on the plan): Jacks (95), Jubber (96), Court (97), Parsons (98), Baynes (99), ?Tyrer (100), and Treacher (101). Both Baynes and Jubber were still occupying these shops in 1839.
The ecclesiastical warehouse based at No. 99 in this row may well have been in the mind of Thomas Hardy when he wrote Jude the Obscure in 1895. Jude’s cousin Sue Bridehead who lived in Oxford was:
an artist or designer of some sort in what was called an ecclesiastical warehouse, which was a perfect seed-bed of idolatry… The shop seemed to be kept entirely by women. It contained Anglican books, stationery, texts, and fancy goods; little plaster angels on brackets, Gothic-framed pictures of saints, ebony crosses that were almost crucifixes, prayer-books that were almost missals.
Several of the businesses that once operated in this row of shops and are shown in the table below later flourished elsewhere in Oxford:
- Adamson & Co. Tailors moved across Oriel Street to huge new premises at 102/103 High Street in 1891;
- Hall Bros Tailors moved to 94 High Street and later to 119 High Street;
- Joseph Vincent moved to 109 High Street;
- The junior photographer James Soame joined up with Gillman to form Gillman & Soame, the photographic firm that still survives today.
Occupiers of the site
of 95–101 High Street |
|||||||
Date |
95 High St |
96 High St |
97 High St |
98 High St |
99 High St |
100 High St |
101 High St |
1772 |
Craddock |
Morton |
Court |
Buck |
BAYNE family, cutlers, Mary Bayne Charles Bayne John Bayne Ann Bayne Mary A. Bayne (1852) |
Johnson |
King |
1814 |
Jacks |
Henry Jubber |
Parsons |
Tyrer[?] |
Treacher |
||
1839 |
John Bellman |
Charles Feldon |
Ann Davis |
Thomas
Roberts |
James Spiers |
||
1846 |
Joseph Steele, M. R. King |
E. T. Spiers Later (Moved next door in 1859 and gave up the bookselling) |
Charles Wyndham Robinson |
Henry Brown |
|||
1852 |
Robert Milne, Watch & clock maker, silversmith, jeweller & engraver to March, then James Sheard |
Charles Joseph Sweetinburgh |
|||||
1861 |
E. T. Spiers
|
District Savings Bank |
|||||
1876 |
George P. Day |
Flack & Smith With |
John King |
Mrs Wells The Misses |
Adamson
& Co. |
||
1880 |
John Chapman |
HEDDERLY
William Hedderly
William Hedderly,
William Hedderly |
|||||
1884 |
Page & Slade |
||||||
1887 |
Slade & Co |
||||||
1889– |
W. G. Hooper |
||||||
1893 |
Arthur Richardson
Joseph Vincent |
Mrs Henrietta Armstrong |
Edwin Saunders |
Oriental Art Company |
|||
1894 |
Mrs Carter Upstairs: University lodgings |
||||||
1895– |
George Richard Beesley |
Mrs Ellen Davis |
James Soame |
||||
1900– |
Miss A. K. Baughan [Bates & Co. is listed over the door in a 1909 photograph but is not mentioned in directories] |
||||||
1904 |
Miss Smith, M.A. |
||||||
1905– |
Frank Thomas Long |
||||||
1909 |
No listing |
||||||
1910 |
No listing: Building work |
||||||
Since |
Rhodes Building, Oriel College |
* The chemist David Morphew announced in Jackson’s Oxford Journal of 16 December 1832 that he was retiring through ill-health, and that his successor in business would be James Spiers. Then on 28 August 1841 James Spiers announced in turn that he had retired and that his successor would be Henry Brown.