The more I read about Oxford architecture, the more I realise that architectural historians are, for the most part, hyper-critical narcissists. The phrase ‘those who can’t do, write’ comes to mind – although that might be something of a boulder catapulted through the fragile glass walls of student journalism. In keeping with this cliché of excessive negativity, I’d like to reproduce some of the choice quotes that have been expressed in relation to Nuffield College. “Oxford’s biggest monument to barren reaction”; “a hodge-podge from the start”; “a gauche parody of the steeples of medieval Oxford” or that the “best hope for the college is vegetation.”
The college was built in 1949 on the former site of the Oxford canal basin – it’s situated on New Road, opposite the car park – so the next time you’ll walk past it will probably be on the way to Park End. Despite the critical timbre of the writing that pertains to Nuffield, I think peeking in through its west gate would be a gratifying diversion next time you’re drunkenly careening towards a small hot and loud room full of thwarted conversations and inevitable regret.
I like Nuffield college, and the reason I like it is basically the same reason that a lot of people dislike it – it’s a bit of a “hodge-podge”. The quad of Nuffield exudes an air of parochialism, with high gables; irregular stone slate roofing and wooden framed hip-roof dormers. Stylistically, it could almost fit into the standard cottage model of so many of Oxford’s outlying villages – expressed in archetypal honey-coloured Cotswold stone. And yet, the inscrutably smooth ashlar facades, the curiously sharply cut mullions – particularly the rounded arches of the doorways evoke a retro-futurist sense of modernity – the ideas of modernism expressed in the language of tradition. Nowhere is this more evident than in the copper-spiked library tower, whose modernist sharp lines and regimented windows rise inexplicably out of the quad. All of this makes a walk around Nuffield slightly surreal – it feels like stepping backwards to step forwards, seeing an architect desperately reaching towards the future, out of the past.
This was not what architect Austen Harrison first envisaged when he started work on Nuffield – the noted designer of several buildings for the diplomatic core in the Middle East, including the high commissioner’s residence in Jerusalem. He produced the blueprints for a massive, round arched, Greek Doric building, with split-level quad and vaulting lantern tower. Lord Nuffield, the benefactor behind the founding of the college, rejected Harrison’s initial plans as being “un-English”. This search for a more ‘English’ style drove Harrison to the curious hodge-podge reality of the parish-pump modernism of the college’s architecture. Lord Nuffield was, of course, William Morris (not that one) – the founder of Morris Motors, whose interwar car factories so transformed the outskirts of eastern Oxford. His legacy is acted out in the motor wheel motifs that adorn the gable ends of the quad – a homage to the technology which allowed for the college to be built in the first place.
However, in insisting on the ‘Englishness’ of his collegiate legacy, Morris fulfils the archetype of that certain class of English industrialist who revered the bucolic particularism of old England, and yet acted as one of the primary motors of its disappearance. This entrenched doublethink – the nostalgic moderniser, lies at the heart of the curious beauty of this much maligned piece of Oxford’s landscape, which may not deserve a reappraisal by those who actually know about architecture, but certainly deserves a few minutes of your attention.
