LONDON, UK.- Heritage Minister Andrew McIntosh today announced plans to list as Grade II*, Blue Boar Quad at Christ Church, Oxford University a college residence designed by Powell and Moya and built between 1965 and 1968. Powell and Moya are the most highly regarded architectural practice of the 1960s, as designers of modern buildings using elegant proportions and traditional materials. They are particularly noted for the way in which they managed to put good modern buildings into historic college settings, first at Oxford and then at Cambridge.

Andrew McIntosh said: “ Oxford University contains many of the finest university buildings in the country, from all periods. Blue Boar Quad is regarded as one of the best buildings constructed during the great 1960s expansion of university education across Britain. It is also recognised as one of the earliest, most substantial and least altered post-war university buildings by arguably the leading specialist in the genre.

“ That’s why I am proposing that the building should be given a Grade II* listing - a higher category listing which is shared by only 20,000 other structures in the country and which provides an added degree of protection. “

Blue Boar Quad was built on the site of a car park and garages abutting the narrow, high-walled Blue Boar Street. Powell and Moya built their scheme right up against it developing Oxford’s reputation for its stunning skyline by adding penthouses to provide a broken, set-back series of horizontal planes that helps to reduce the scale of the development seen from the street.

The quad itself is a staggered, extended ‘U’-shaped development of 61 flats and 8 penthouses set off four staircases. On the fourth side, the rectangular shape of the site was interrupted by the old college brewhouse, which made the space somewhat ‘L’-shaped. Much of the building is of four storeys, but the westernmost section, is of 3 storeys with a semi-basement underneath, used as a meeting room and housing the archives.

Portland Whitbed and Roach Stone is used externally as facings to the brick cross walls, forming a series of buttresses and creating a sense of enclosure between the study bedrooms.

Local people and interest groups now have the chance to tell the Minister whether they believe the building merits the extra protection that listing provides. Views on this should now be sent by Friday, 7 April, 2005 at the latest to: Ms H Phillips, Historic Environment Designation Branch, Department for Culture, Media and Sport,
2-4 Cockspur Street, London SW1Y 5DH.
email: helen.phillips@culture.gsi.gov.uk