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It's a truism that we shape our buildings and in turn our buildings shape us.

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And that's especially applicable to the environments in which we spend our most formative years, such as our time at university.

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I'm going to limit myself in this talk to institutions that were intended for women studying for university degrees.

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So I'm not going to talk about girls schools, training colleges for governesses or school teachers or nurses.

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I'm not talking either about women's halls of residence at coeducational institutions.

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So. There weren't any higher risk education institutions in this exclusive before women until 1849,

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when Elizabeth General Reeves opened a ladies college in Bedford Square in Bloomsbury,

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which we see on the left that became a residential establishment in 1860,

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took over the adjoining house, in fact, and later became part of the University of London.

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Now, after two those are English universities, there was nothing until the foundation of what later became Girton College and Cambridge.

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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.

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Two years later, it moved. To not to Cambridge, but to a site near Cambridge in 1872.

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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.

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Nor did she have the money to acquire the site.

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So there is an element of seclusion, which is something that just sends mixed and runs through the whole narrative of women's colleges.

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The building has an unusual had an unusual plan.

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It was essentially a block of lecture rooms, which you see on the bottom right in the plan with too long wings.

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The first one going up to the north and then the second one, which came a bit later and to the west.

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And you can see one of those wings in the top right image.

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Each wing contains pairs of rooms.

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So each student had two room rooms to herself and the rooms were approached through east facing Kooris corridor.

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So there was an element premiere's privacy there as well.

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The architect who was called upon to design this was Alfred Waterhouse, very well known already for his buildings in the north of England.

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He designed the Manchester and Sized Coats, a big Gothic revival building, designed the first buildings for the University of Manchester.

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Still there. And also designs extensions to King's College in Cambridge, to Bayville in Oxford.

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And in fact, he designs the facade to Broadstreet for payroll college.

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What's happened to go has most of the women's colleges.

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Whether they expand is due to greater demands. And there was later a big extension, which you see in the bottom right.

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With a new wing entered through a gates tower, which led him to a courtyard and a hall,

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and that was designed by Waterhouse to and by his son, Sarah Pat.

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There's a pattern emerging here which will see as we go on of buildings which

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gradually expand as they become more widely used and attract more students.

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Now, when Girton College was founded, it was intended to teach exactly the same curriculum as male students at Cambridge had.

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But it's her Newnham College, which was founded about the same time and was slightly different in its intention.

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It was non-denominational and had no chapel, and the students originally had their own curriculum,

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which was separate from that of the main university there in time.

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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.

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It was on the far side of the river, calm and again started with a single building which was called Old Hall,

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which you see in the bottom right of the grounds plan.

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And that was for 26 students, but then expanded around this loose arrangement around a courtyard with buildings designed by Basil Sharpness,

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who was one of the most important architects of university buildings in the late 19th century.

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And he designed quite a lot in art, too, including the sound of Aureole College to the High Street.

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But what we're looking at here is more interesting than that.

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It's an attempt to use a style which would be suited to the kinds of domestic environments that.

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Women's colleges in Cambridge and Oxford wanted something less institutional and more homely and domestic college life.

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And chutneys must necessarily be a hotter, more domestic rate than in colleges for men.

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So building with staircases leading into a courtyard was not thought to be appropriate.

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Instead, there are a series of separate holes, which you can see in the plan, which were loosely grouped together.

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And there was a unity provided by a choice of style, which is what was known at the time as Queen Arm.

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It's an eclectic style, bringing together elements of classical and for macular architecture in particular,

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through the use of red brick with white painted trim of the and the windows and so on, so forth.

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And it's a remarkably it's a very attractive ensemble of buildings,

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which you can also see in the right hardly image of the gates entrance to the college.

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Today. Oxfords women call women's colleges came late Somervell.

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Starting in 1879, in a house called Walson House outside the built up area, the town in a very pastoral setting.

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Winery's students recalled for the first few years, two cows and a pig forms part of the establishment.

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But these were later replaced by a pony and a donkey.

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Adding to the picturesque and homely look of the place, which is conveyed in these early images of Silvani house,

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which was built in the eighteen twenties, and that was where the first of the dozen students at Somerville College lived.

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And that hour on the right and playing the cross. I think just outside Cinzano ashis church, which is to the right that building.

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So that was very, very low key.

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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,

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but built with much more lavish funds, coming from a fortune accumulated by Thomas Holloway, who is a successful manufacturer.

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And ointments and pills presumably get geared towards a largely female clientele.

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He paid for the land and the building, which is right outside London.

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I'm in the countryside to the southwest Hecate.

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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.

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At the same period. And in fact, the layout of this building is very reminiscent of one of those schools.

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Not too far, too far away, which is Wennington College, built in the eighteen fifties.

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But the style here is very much the style of the French renaissance, which has a fairly short in vogue in the period.

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You can see it in the Bohr's Museum outside Parliament Castle, for instance.

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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.

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Strange. And what we see in the grounds plan on the right is basically two big courtyards.

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One is long residential wings to the left and right with separated rooms separated by corridors and then the communal buildings in the middle.

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So one of them contains the chapel, which is the entrance building on top, and then the hole is in the centre.

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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,

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because Hollaway left his collection of pictures until holidays, which are still rescate.

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And you can just see them. So here we have the chapel.

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And you can see this is all SCANA, much more lavish than anything outside the Martha London College.

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Is more like the Oxford or Cambridge colleges at the time.

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And I particularly want to emphasise the colleges normally.

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You see in the Boston lights, Holloway's original idea was that this would be well brought up,

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upper middle class young ladies who would actually come with their servants who live in the attics.

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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.

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But the students were expect it to lead a fairly upper class type of life.

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And the early students wrote that the site was, quote, perfect for the development of freshman ideals of collegiate life,

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the life of a country house where the staff were hostesses and the students

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guests who were to be introduced to a harmonious life of purposeful learning.

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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.

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And here we have a college family. That's where our hollaway photographed in about nineteen hundred or thereabouts.

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Holloway was and still is a rather unique institution.

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Most women's colleges were less lavish, a were less lavish.

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In fact, London University was originally a degree giving and not a teaching institution.

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It allowed women to take degrees in 1878, which is well before Oxford or Cambridge did.

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But to teach the women in separate residential colleges were needed.

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We've already seen Bedford College.

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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,

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which you can just see on the right. And the residential wing was built gradually starting in 1890, overlooking the lawn there.

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And so here we have a residential college for women reading for nuns in university degrees.

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And here we have a much bigger one. And Bedford College, as we've seen, started in Bedford Square.

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Pontic moved in 1911 to a new site in the inner circle of Regent's Park.

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And here, Basil Trumpton is yet again designs a big assemblage of buildings.

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On the left is one of the residential blocks which we see a photograph of the top.

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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.

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So this is really a complete university for women in itself, as distinct from the women's colleges and Oxford at Oxford and Cambridge.

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And they, too, expounded in the 80s and 90s.

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You could say that the islands in eighteen nineties was the decade of the new woman.

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It's a time of great emancipation, though by no means for the emancipation.

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It's the time you begin to get much more widespread movements for the suffrage and also more opportunities for women.

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Women's employment. And so the demand for degrees grew.

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And that explains why some of the old college employers, a local architect,

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are making trouble more to design a new building for the students they're building, New said.

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When the building was opened that the idea of this scheme.

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Is that the students, they should live as members of a large family under the care of a lazy principal,

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each being provided with separate apartments fitted up as the sitting room and bedroom.

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In other words, what you are to have in a men's college and hence the right,

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and said the arrangements of the plan corresponds somewhat to that of an ordinary residence.

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Again, this domestic ideal again, and that applies also to Lady Margaret Hall,

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which again had very relatively meagre beginnings at the end of Narim Gardens,

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but then expanded with new buildings by Reginal Blomfield in 1897 and nineteen

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oh five after the founders has acquired land stretching down to the child.

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Well now, which of course, two very attractive gardens of native Margaret Hall and we see today at Blomfield style didn't go.

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Go back to the tutors or to the so-called Queen Anne style.

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Here's a drawing on Nipponese domestic architecture of the late 70s and early 80s centuries with rage break and again,

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a lot of white paints and the hips, Ruth, that you would see in a traditional country house of time.

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Again, the domestic ideal. And that is also marked when you look at Playground's plan of the words with building at an age.

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And you can see that that has central corridor with rooms, groups about around.

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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.

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And that was originally the case also at Somerville.

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But Somerville began to develop in a slightly different way.

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And just before the First World War, first of all, of its acquired Italian library,

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which is very large and an impressive building, one of the largest libraries in any Oxford college at the time.

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This was still a time when undergraduates did not use the college libraries.

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They weren't expecting to. And in the men's colleges.

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So you're Grossmann, the library there, but also a big dining hall that you can see on the right,

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designed by Edmund Fisher, brother of neat and famous historian HGL Fisher.

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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

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you might call the erosion of the idea of separate households constituting the college.

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And then just to finish a brief mention of St. Hilda's, which was founded in 1893 by Misdeal Famous for Children,

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the latest college that was founded in a house called Carletti House, which gradually extended alongside that along the banks of the Charr.

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Well, during is a rather unusual and Zinnia type of ground plan that we see today.

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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.

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With money given by a woman who had been very active in the campaigns for women's suffrage and the buildings

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they are designed by a firm from Birmingham were and went up right to the beginning of the First World War,

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and they looked out onto a garden which was created after the war by a fellow called Hammie Rochus,

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who was an enthusiast for the ideas of William Morris and Gertrude Chacal.

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And that's really one of the most attractive Oxford College gardens still today.

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So by 1914, you have that distinctive type of building which is intended for higher education for women.

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And that became the setting for the university education of countless woman women, both then and still today.

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Thank you.