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Deneke Building, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford

The Deneke Benefaction

Giles Gilbert Scott was engaged at Lady Margaret Hall, a ladies’ college of the University of Oxford, for three years from 1931 during which time he also designed the college chapel. The college, founded in 1878, had purchased a large plot of land in north Oxford in 1894 and set about a slow process of architectural development.

Margaret and Helena Deneke, sisters, had been associated with Lady Margaret Hall for several decades by 1930. During a recital tour of America, which Margaret regularly undertook in aid of the the College finances, Mrs Edward Harkness made a benefaction to her of £35,000. Finally, the College council were able to realise their ambition of accommodating the entire college under one roof. Mrs Harkness stipulated that the building made possible by her gift should be named: ‘after those who worked for it and not after those who merely gave money'; thus is gained its name: The Deneke Building.

Scott’s new building

Scott was appointed soon after the benefaction was made and he quickly set to work designing a building capable of housing 156 students, administrators, Fellows, and the Principal, alongside all the concomitant facilities that they demanded. The result was a handsome red brick block with stone dressings, unremitting in its grand Classical scale and almost Hawksmoorian in its monumental austerity. The Hall, at the centre of Scott’s block, is of a generous breadth and is lit from on high by a row of arched windows.

The manner of the Deneke Building is quite in contrast to the Byzantine flair of the chapel to which it is linked by a long corridor. It was in part thanks to his work at Lady Margaret Hall that Scott was commissioned to design the New Bodleian Library later that same decade.