It's a truism that we shape our buildings and in turn our buildings shape us.
And that's especially applicable to the environments in which we spend our most formative years, such as our time at university.
I'm going to limit myself in this talk to institutions that were intended for women studying for university degrees.
So I'm not going to talk about girls schools, training colleges for governesses or school teachers or nurses.
I'm not talking either about women's halls of residence at coeducational institutions.
So. There weren't any higher risk education institutions in this exclusive before women until 1849,
when Elizabeth General Reeves opened a ladies college in Bedford Square in Bloomsbury,
which we see on the left that became a residential establishment in 1860,
took over the adjoining house, in fact, and later became part of the University of London.
Now, after two those are English universities, there was nothing until the foundation of what later became Girton College and Cambridge.
And by Emily Davis at 80 in 1869, that was a tiny institution when it started for only 13 students who left in a house has hitchin in heart fiction.
Two years later, it moved. To not to Cambridge, but to a site near Cambridge in 1872.
Three. And the reason for that was that Emily Davis did not want the college to be right adjacent to the men's colleges in the university.
Nor did she have the money to acquire the site.
So there is an element of seclusion, which is something that just sends mixed and runs through the whole narrative of women's colleges.
The building has an unusual had an unusual plan.
It was essentially a block of lecture rooms, which you see on the bottom right in the plan with too long wings.
The first one going up to the north and then the second one, which came a bit later and to the west.
And you can see one of those wings in the top right image.
Each wing contains pairs of rooms.
So each student had two room rooms to herself and the rooms were approached through east facing Kooris corridor.
So there was an element premiere's privacy there as well.
The architect who was called upon to design this was Alfred Waterhouse, very well known already for his buildings in the north of England.
He designed the Manchester and Sized Coats, a big Gothic revival building, designed the first buildings for the University of Manchester.
Still there. And also designs extensions to King's College in Cambridge, to Bayville in Oxford.
And in fact, he designs the facade to Broadstreet for payroll college.
What's happened to go has most of the women's colleges.
Whether they expand is due to greater demands. And there was later a big extension, which you see in the bottom right.
With a new wing entered through a gates tower, which led him to a courtyard and a hall,
and that was designed by Waterhouse to and by his son, Sarah Pat.
There's a pattern emerging here which will see as we go on of buildings which
gradually expand as they become more widely used and attract more students.
Now, when Girton College was founded, it was intended to teach exactly the same curriculum as male students at Cambridge had.
But it's her Newnham College, which was founded about the same time and was slightly different in its intention.
It was non-denominational and had no chapel, and the students originally had their own curriculum,
which was separate from that of the main university there in time.
And the two converged and like Gerstmann New Newnham and was on and hope an empty sites but much closer to the centre of the university.
It was on the far side of the river, calm and again started with a single building which was called Old Hall,
which you see in the bottom right of the grounds plan.
And that was for 26 students, but then expanded around this loose arrangement around a courtyard with buildings designed by Basil Sharpness,
who was one of the most important architects of university buildings in the late 19th century.
And he designed quite a lot in art, too, including the sound of Aureole College to the High Street.
But what we're looking at here is more interesting than that.
It's an attempt to use a style which would be suited to the kinds of domestic environments that.
Women's colleges in Cambridge and Oxford wanted something less institutional and more homely and domestic college life.
And chutneys must necessarily be a hotter, more domestic rate than in colleges for men.
So building with staircases leading into a courtyard was not thought to be appropriate.
Instead, there are a series of separate holes, which you can see in the plan, which were loosely grouped together.
And there was a unity provided by a choice of style, which is what was known at the time as Queen Arm.
It's an eclectic style, bringing together elements of classical and for macular architecture in particular,
through the use of red brick with white painted trim of the and the windows and so on, so forth.
And it's a remarkably it's a very attractive ensemble of buildings,
which you can also see in the right hardly image of the gates entrance to the college.
Today. Oxfords women call women's colleges came late Somervell.
Starting in 1879, in a house called Walson House outside the built up area, the town in a very pastoral setting.
Winery's students recalled for the first few years, two cows and a pig forms part of the establishment.
But these were later replaced by a pony and a donkey.
Adding to the picturesque and homely look of the place, which is conveyed in these early images of Silvani house,
which was built in the eighteen twenties, and that was where the first of the dozen students at Somerville College lived.
And that hour on the right and playing the cross. I think just outside Cinzano ashis church, which is to the right that building.
So that was very, very low key.
Now Larche is not a term that you would apply to Royal Holloway College built become, in fact, in the same year as Somervell, 1879,
but built with much more lavish funds, coming from a fortune accumulated by Thomas Holloway, who is a successful manufacturer.
And ointments and pills presumably get geared towards a largely female clientele.
He paid for the land and the building, which is right outside London.
I'm in the countryside to the southwest Hecate.
And in that sense, this is very much like a lot of the schools and asylums that went up around the edge of London and big industrial cities.
At the same period. And in fact, the layout of this building is very reminiscent of one of those schools.
Not too far, too far away, which is Wennington College, built in the eighteen fifties.
But the style here is very much the style of the French renaissance, which has a fairly short in vogue in the period.
You can see it in the Bohr's Museum outside Parliament Castle, for instance.
And this star was insisted upon by Holloway, who chose the architect who was the designer of the town hall of Rochdale and the London Cornick.
Strange. And what we see in the grounds plan on the right is basically two big courtyards.
One is long residential wings to the left and right with separated rooms separated by corridors and then the communal buildings in the middle.
So one of them contains the chapel, which is the entrance building on top, and then the hole is in the centre.
And then at the bottom you have something you tell Cassidy and the other I'm picturing a university building with a period which is an art gallery,
because Hollaway left his collection of pictures until holidays, which are still rescate.
And you can just see them. So here we have the chapel.
And you can see this is all SCANA, much more lavish than anything outside the Martha London College.
Is more like the Oxford or Cambridge colleges at the time.
And I particularly want to emphasise the colleges normally.
You see in the Boston lights, Holloway's original idea was that this would be well brought up,
upper middle class young ladies who would actually come with their servants who live in the attics.
Now, as it turned out, though, you didn't get those kinds of young ladies, didn't go to a major occasional institutions of this kind.
But the students were expect it to lead a fairly upper class type of life.
And the early students wrote that the site was, quote, perfect for the development of freshman ideals of collegiate life,
the life of a country house where the staff were hostesses and the students
guests who were to be introduced to a harmonious life of purposeful learning.
And here they are grouped together in college. Families who sat together at meals, had tea together in their rooms and dressed for the occasion.
And here we have a college family. That's where our hollaway photographed in about nineteen hundred or thereabouts.
Holloway was and still is a rather unique institution.
Most women's colleges were less lavish, a were less lavish.
In fact, London University was originally a degree giving and not a teaching institution.
It allowed women to take degrees in 1878, which is well before Oxford or Cambridge did.
But to teach the women in separate residential colleges were needed.
We've already seen Bedford College.
But here we have Westfields, which was founded in two houses in Hub's states in 1882 and then moved up further to a building called Kids Appar Hall,
which you can just see on the right. And the residential wing was built gradually starting in 1890, overlooking the lawn there.
And so here we have a residential college for women reading for nuns in university degrees.
And here we have a much bigger one. And Bedford College, as we've seen, started in Bedford Square.
Pontic moved in 1911 to a new site in the inner circle of Regent's Park.
And here, Basil Trumpton is yet again designs a big assemblage of buildings.
On the left is one of the residential blocks which we see a photograph of the top.
And then as we move out of the middle, there's science blog and two science blogs, in fact, an arts lecture room, blog and a library.
So this is really a complete university for women in itself, as distinct from the women's colleges and Oxford at Oxford and Cambridge.
And they, too, expounded in the 80s and 90s.
You could say that the islands in eighteen nineties was the decade of the new woman.
It's a time of great emancipation, though by no means for the emancipation.
It's the time you begin to get much more widespread movements for the suffrage and also more opportunities for women.
Women's employment. And so the demand for degrees grew.
And that explains why some of the old college employers, a local architect,
are making trouble more to design a new building for the students they're building, New said.
When the building was opened that the idea of this scheme.
Is that the students, they should live as members of a large family under the care of a lazy principal,
each being provided with separate apartments fitted up as the sitting room and bedroom.
In other words, what you are to have in a men's college and hence the right,
and said the arrangements of the plan corresponds somewhat to that of an ordinary residence.
Again, this domestic ideal again, and that applies also to Lady Margaret Hall,
which again had very relatively meagre beginnings at the end of Narim Gardens,
but then expanded with new buildings by Reginal Blomfield in 1897 and nineteen
oh five after the founders has acquired land stretching down to the child.
Well now, which of course, two very attractive gardens of native Margaret Hall and we see today at Blomfield style didn't go.
Go back to the tutors or to the so-called Queen Anne style.
Here's a drawing on Nipponese domestic architecture of the late 70s and early 80s centuries with rage break and again,
a lot of white paints and the hips, Ruth, that you would see in a traditional country house of time.
Again, the domestic ideal. And that is also marked when you look at Playground's plan of the words with building at an age.
And you can see that that has central corridor with rooms, groups about around.
So in other words, the inhabitants of this building would form a kind of residential domestic group with their own common room and so on and so forth.
And that was originally the case also at Somerville.
But Somerville began to develop in a slightly different way.
And just before the First World War, first of all, of its acquired Italian library,
which is very large and an impressive building, one of the largest libraries in any Oxford college at the time.
This was still a time when undergraduates did not use the college libraries.
They weren't expecting to. And in the men's colleges.
So you're Grossmann, the library there, but also a big dining hall that you can see on the right,
designed by Edmund Fisher, brother of neat and famous historian HGL Fisher.
And that is the Hall of Somerville today. And again, I moved to a rather more classical style of architecture here and the beginning of what
you might call the erosion of the idea of separate households constituting the college.
And then just to finish a brief mention of St. Hilda's, which was founded in 1893 by Misdeal Famous for Children,
the latest college that was founded in a house called Carletti House, which gradually extended alongside that along the banks of the Charr.
Well, during is a rather unusual and Zinnia type of ground plan that we see today.
And then finally, some shoes originally and Narim Gardens, but moving in 1913 to a villa of between the bambury and Woodstock Road school, The Mount.
With money given by a woman who had been very active in the campaigns for women's suffrage and the buildings
they are designed by a firm from Birmingham were and went up right to the beginning of the First World War,
and they looked out onto a garden which was created after the war by a fellow called Hammie Rochus,
who was an enthusiast for the ideas of William Morris and Gertrude Chacal.
And that's really one of the most attractive Oxford College gardens still today.
So by 1914, you have that distinctive type of building which is intended for higher education for women.
And that became the setting for the university education of countless woman women, both then and still today.
Thank you.