St Cross College

St Cross College stands in Oxford’s St Giles’, a quiet street lined with colleges and museums. Its Gothic and traditional buildings form two quads around a shared site with Pusey House, a theological library and chapel built between 1884 and 1926 by Temple, Leslie Moore and Ninian Comper. The Richard Blackwell Quadrangle, once nicknamed ‘the Quad’, holds the Saugman Common Room, converted from old cloisters by Geoffrey Beard. The Four Colleges Arch at its west end was paid for by Merton, All Souls, Christ Church and St John’s. Behind the arch a medieval wall once bordered a garden that allowed the college to plan a second quad. The West Quad, finished in 2017 after a planning dispute over the wall, contains fifty student rooms, a lecture theatre and the Douglas and Catherine Wigdor Library with its garden room. The South Wing of the West Quad contains the hall, kitchen and Ian Skipper conference room, while Bradmore Road House and Stonemason House provide further rooms nearby. The master’s lodgings sit in Wellington Square, a short walk from the main site. The college still owns its first site on St Cross Road, now the St Cross Annexe shared with Brasenose. St Cross is Oxford’s largest graduate college, with over five hundred students reading subjects across the sciences and arts. More than three-quarters of the students come from outside the UK, matching the college motto ‘to the four corners of the earth’. Weekly seminars and annual conferences bring fellows and students together, and the Boat Club and women’s football team compete in university competitions. Formal halls and termly feasts give the community regular chances to gather.