Revealed: £10m vision of college (From The Oxford Times)

Revealed: £10m vision of college

6:31pm Wednesday 3rd February 2010 in News By Reg Little

Artist’s impression of the new site

St Anne’s College’s facade on Woodstock Road, Oxford, is set to be transformed as part of a £10m scheme.

The college plans to build a new library and learning centre and demolish two existing residential buildings, which it says are no longer suitable.

The scheme will allow the college’s most impressive building, the grade II-listed Hartland House, to be seen from the road.

It has been hidden by the Gatehouse building since the 1960s.

The library will have three storeys above ground and one below, with the building containing seminar rooms and exhibition spaces. A sunken courtyard will link the new library below ground with adjacent seminar rooms.

Completing the new college frontage will be a stone-built kitchen next to the library. It will have a garden roof, reached from the first floor of the new library.

The new £3m catering facilities will also be connected to the college’s existing dining room.

St Anne’s principal Tim Gardam said: “The scheme will mean people will be able to see right into the college and view the frontage of Hartland House, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1937. The buildings to go are not distinguished.”

The college has been given £1m by an anonymous donor to get the scheme under way.

The rest of the funding will come from an appeal by the college to raise £25m over 10 years.

The Gatehouse, one of the buildings the college wants to demolish, was recently proposed for listing by English Heritage, but St Anne’s has submitted a strong case “not to list”, as it did in 2003.

As well as removing the Gatehouse, the scheme would mean the demolition of an Edwardian cottage on Woodstock Road.

Plans have been submitted to Oxford City Council, with St Anne’s hoping to begin work on the kitchen next year and the library in 2012.

The scheme is the latest in a series of major Oxford University developments proposed nearby.

Keble College has submitted plans for a £50m scheme to create a new campus between Woodstock and Banbury Road on the site of the former Acland private hospital.

On the other side of Woodstock Road, the former Radcliffe Infirmary site is being redeveloped by Oxford University into one of the city’s biggest building projects for a century.

This week, the university appointed Laing O’Rourke as the contractor for Somerville College’s new student accommodation buildings, which will be one of the first new buildings on the site of the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter.

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