Church Street

Oxford Brookes University started life in the Taylor Institution in 1865, and the Headington campus was formally opened in 1963. But from 1894 to 1959 the heart of the institution was a modest building in St Ebbe’s.

The Oxford City Technical School moved to new premises on the site of the old Bluecoat School for Boys in Church Street in 1894. The new building was designed by Harry Wilkinson Moore, the architect behind the covered bridge over Logic Lane and many North Oxford houses. He also designed two houses on Pullens Lane which were later part of Oxford Brookes: The Vines and Cotuit Hall. 

Church Street, St Ebbe's by John Henry Brookes, 1954

The Church Street building did not meet the school’s needs for long. Just five years after the move, the Department of Science and Art declared the site inadequate and threatened to pull its funding.

As the school continued to grow more and more premises were found and borrowed all over the city to accommodate classes. Hopes that a new college would be built on Cowley Road were dashed by the outbreak of war in 1939, although a reduced scheme went ahead, and by the 1940s an inspection report listed nineteen separate teaching locations.

By then the Church Street building had seriously deteriorated. Reginald Grimshaw, who was appointed as head of the School of Art after the war, remembers being allocated a desk: "Naturally, as the last to come I had the bit where there was an uncontrollable drip from the skylight above during wet weather and a bucket beside my chair was essential."

Barbara Cleary attended the Oxford School of Technology, Art and Commerce in Church Street from 1949 to 1951. She also went on to work for the school on its Cowley Road site, and would occasionally provide cover in Church Street. She remembers the cold in those buildings gave her chilblains: "It was not good for typing on typewriters then – so many people remarked on my swollen hands, so embarrassing!”

Hilary Stenning was a student at the School of Art during those years, and has fond memories of St Ebbe's:

“The art school then down in St Ebbe’s was wonderful. Terrific character the whole of that St Ebbe’s area. Still quite slummy I suppose one would say, and very run down. But the building itself was a great gloomy-looking brick building and you went in through an archway, and I remember the caretaker there who ran a little shop for students to buy paper and pencils and things, into a courtyard, and rather a jumble of buildings.”

By the time she left the school in 1954 the foundation stone for the Headington buildings had been laid and Cheney School had moved out of Church Street to Cheney Lane.

Cheney School moves out of Church Street

The School of Art was the last department to move out, in 1959. Despite the building's poor state of repair, there was real affection for the place and great sadness at leaving it behind.

Patrick Jeffs, who started studying at the School of Art in 1958, remembers the Church Street premises fondly:

“St Ebbe’s was a really old decrepit building, which we loved. Bits were dropping off. I remember in the lithography room, for instance, that you could see the water ooze up between the wooden blocks when you walked across the room... The student common room was another decrepit old building, and it was all so lovely to us because you felt so free and you didn’t feel like you were going to spoil anything.” 
By contrast the new, state-of-the-art studios in Headington felt intimidating until students had made their mark.

This last move spelt the end of the Church Street building. Redevelopment of St Ebbe’s had already started, and it was earmarked for demolition, alongside much of the neighbourhood. The Westgate Centre stands in its place, with Pennyfarthing Place the street’s only remnant.

Reginald Grimshaw, the head of the School of Art, wrote a moving piece for the local press to mark the end of an era: 

“Let them take care as they go about knocking down the School of Art. Already there are signs that the old building resents being condemned. … After all, the old lady has bred some noble progeny and had some cause to feel slighted…. They all grew up and left, and it seems fitting that the Art School should be the last to go and, having gone, that nothing should remain. … They were a complete cross-section, doctors and nurses, housewives and office workers, undergraduates and dons, for it is difficult to go far in Oxford without meeting someone who was at Church Street at some time. … They will take away more than rubble when they knock down the old Art School.”

John Henry Brookes too, despite his efforts over the decades to relocate the college to better premises, was sentimental about Church Street, and gave it a heart-felt eulogy: "An insignificant building in an insignificant street, it has made a noble contribution to Oxford life and its passing will evoke grateful recollections of ‘the old Tech’.”

For more information, follow the links in the text or explore the anniversary timeline. 

More testimonies can also be found in Bryan Brown's biography of John Henry Brookes.