Rhodes House

Rhodes House stands in central Oxford on South Parks Road, a two-acre site bought from Wadham College in 1925. The building was designed by Sir Herbert Baker to recall Cape Dutch farmhouses and English country mansions, with large oak beams, trans-domed windows and a Tetra-style portico. Its square rubble walls follow the 17th-century style of Oxford’s older colleges. Inside, an open-well staircase rises from oak, its balusters shaped and topped with carved eagle finials. Completed in 1928, the house became the Rhodes Trust headquarters and a centre for research on the British Empire, Commonwealth, Africa and the United States. The house holds a library of more than 330 000 books and archives moved from the Bodleian in 1928. In 1931 Albert Einstein delivered three lectures here, and the blackboard from the second talk is now in Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science. Portraits and busts line the rooms, including those of Queen Elizabeth II, Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Zambian human-rights activist Lucy Banda-Sichone. A 2015 portrait of Banda-Sichone was the first of a woman Rhodes Scholar ever displayed in the building. Visitors find public rooms arranged around a central hall where Rhodes Scholars hold their annual dinner. The library once held the Bodleian’s Commonwealth and African collections before moving to the Weston Library in 2014. The Rhodes Trust, based here since 1902, awards scholarships to students from fourteen regions and runs programmes with partners such as Schmidt Science Fellows. The Warden’s residence occupies part of the house, and the building remains the administrative heart of the trust’s work.