St Catherine’s origins lay in a Delegacy of 1868 for ‘unattached’ students unable to pay college fees. The students founded a social club, called St Catharine’s from the hall where it met, and further clubs adopted the name in its modern spelling. In 1931 the Delegacy became the St Catherine’s Society, which appointed Alan Bullock, Dean of New College, as its Censor or warden in 1952. He quickly recognised that in the post-war era, when increasing numbers of students had grants but the cost of digs was rising fast, the need was for more accommodation. In April 1956 he proposed a new undergraduate college that would be equally balanced between the sciences and the arts, marking a shift towards science at Oxford. It was formally constituted in 1962.
Because St Catherine’s grew out of the University itself, the University Grants Committee was permitted to offer funding towards the site and study bedrooms, but money for the college’s common areas had to come from private sources. These initially were dominated by British industry, attracted by the emphasis on science. The Ford Foundation presented $100,000, and an alumnus, Dr Rudolph Light, gave over $1,000,000 just as rising costs threatened the scheme in June 1961. Money for the initial landscaping and planting came from the Coulthurst Trust.
In October 1956 Merton College offered six acres of Holywell Great Meadow close to the city centre. By 1959 a 7.9 acre site had been secured, bounded to the west by an arm of the River Cherwell canalised in the seventeenth century to serve a flour mill, with road access only from the north. It was an almost featureless field, but the south-western boundary with Magdalen College was determined by the remains of a Civil War ravelin built to defend the flour mill. This earthwork may extend slightly into the southern endge of the present St Catherine's College landscape. The land was raised when Oxford City Council used it as a tip in the late 1930s before adding topsoil, and in the late 1940s it was used as allotments. Povl Ahm of the engineers Ove Arup and Partners built the flat Napper’s Bridge leading on to the site in 1960-1.
A sub-committee of the University’s Committee on Elevations and the Choice of Architects, established in 1957 amidst a growing enthusiasm to go modern, was appointed to find an architect, aided by the university surveyor, Jack Lankester. Bullock had seen well-made new university buildings on a research trip to the United States and thought English architecture tame in comparison, while Lankester’s interest in modern furniture had drawn him to make several visits to Denmark. An American architect seemed out of reach, but one from Denmark seemed possible. On behalf of ‘a majority of the Committee [which] would like to see a Danish architect at any rate considered’, in June 1958 Lankester approached Ove Arup for advice. Bullock later intimated that he had already been seduced by images of work by Scandinavian architects in the press. He and his committee considered 37 British architects, before on 5 November 1958 flying to Copenhagen for a two-day inspection of buildings by Arne Jacobsen, Jørn Utzon, C. F. Møller, Vilhelm Wohlert, and Nils and Eva Koppel. Nothing could compare with Arne Jacobsen. ‘Jacobsen’s [Munkegård] school is better than Sheppard’s, his house the best the committee saw. The care over detail is something that other Danes show, but Jacobsen more so.’ Denmark’s social modernism symbolised the egalitarianism that Bullock stood for in Oxford. In Jacobsen’s work, design embraces furniture, light fittings and landscape gardening as well as architecture. This homogeneity appealed to Lankester and Bullock, and as early as February 1959 they proposed that Jacobsen should design furniture and fittings, and also the landscaping. Philip Dowson was persuaded to work ‘in association’ with Jacobsen, but withdrew in September. Instead Lankester liaised with Jacobsen and his assistant Knud Holscher, and later with Peter Denney, Jacobsen’s assistant who drew out and labelled most of the plans in English.
Bullock’s schedule for St Catherine’s borrowed the long, central court with circular lawn in the middle of it from New College, and shows how much else he contributed to the design. In particular he asked for three- or four-storey quadrangles, but with the fourth side left open. Bullock’s open quadrangle was refined by Jacobsen as two parallel ranges of residential accommodation enclosing the site on its longest sides, with the communal facilities set in individual buildings down the middle. The northern end is blocked by the Senior and Junior Common Rooms, of load-bearing brick and placed either side of the kitchen where all three could be easily accessed from the service drive and dining hall. To the south of this lie the library and lecture theatre block. The SCR and a separate master’s house reached their final location only in the plans of February 1960, which also made the library and lecture blocks the same size. The hall has a similar overall size, but without a set-back ground floor to provide a covered walkway it appears larger. Bullock delayed building the lecture block until he found sponsorship from Bernard Sunley.
Covered walkways set between brick piers provide partial stops in the long north-south vistas between the central and outer ranges, and have parallels in Jacobsen’s work at Munkegård School in Gentofte (1952-6), and Nyager School in Rødovre (1959-65). The dominant water feature is a canal which separates the western residential range from the entrance drive and master’s house. At the pivot between the entrance drive and the service entrance is a circular bicycle shed, which with the circular lawn in the main quadrangle are the principal non-linear elements. Only the bell tower makes a counterpoise to the low-rise scheme, an essential element for Jacobsen.
Bullock specified brick for the buildings, as offering the maximum benefits of structural repetition, and thus cohesion, without loss of design freedom. Jacobsen insisted that only 2-inch bricks would give the right scale to the low walls, and the Uxbridge flints he approved in January 1961 were the only ones in Britain close to his desired greenish-yellow colourway. The multi-storey buildings are all formed of pre-cast reinforced concrete frames, which provided a 3-metre grid that extended from the layout of the rooms to the concrete paviours outside. Jacobsen approved the design of every detail of furnishing and furniture that included a new model called the ‘Oxford chair’. The master’s house was originally clad in plywood, while the continuous floor to ceiling glazing of the study bedrooms proved problematic, and was replaced in 2004-2005.
Jacobsen’s attention to every detail extended to the external planting. He produced a detailed planting plan in August 1962, which was modified in 1963 by Dr Barrie Juniper from the Department of Botany (but then working for ICI) who Bullock knew from the Society. Juniper acknowledged in 1996 that ‘Jacobsen forced us to think, as we had never been challenged before, in terms of shapes, textures, shades of green.’ However, Jacobsen’s planting scheme was more suited to dry, sandy Copenhagen conditions than the alkaline, waterlogged Oxford site, and while the emphasis on contrasts of leaf shape, colour and texture remained, Juniper also responded to the college’s demands for some roses, to give an ‘English’ touch. Other correspondence in the college archives shows that Jacobsen was interested in planting bamboos (a few survive near the entrance), and that Jack Lankester also consulted ‘his friend’ Sylvia Crowe in 1960. The water gardens were completed in July 1966, and the JCR Committee borrowed the bronze, ‘Archaean’, from Barbara Hepworth, later bought for the college.
After fifty years, Jacobsen’s framework of paving and yew hedges remains, breaking up the space into garden rooms and effective as windbreaks. The landscaping took years to be established – the Cedar of Lebanon in the central quadrangle is the fourth. More changes followed Jacobsen’s death. Juniper (who became the Garden Master) removed many of the concrete slabs from the SCR garden in 1972 and Michael Gearin-Tosh removed some from the JCR garden in 1974-5. Others have gone piecemeal from the grounds either side of the library and lecture hall. The entrance planting was devised by Jacobsen in November 1968 when the gateway was remodelled, and adapted again by Juniper when the Alan Bullock and Mary Sunley buildings were built in 1982-3 by Jack Lankester in homage to Jacobsen’s style, with the advice of Knud Holscher. Subsequently the college has expanded to the north of the service road (outside the registered area), with buildings by Stephen Hodder from 1994-5, 2002-5 (including a new lodge) and Purcell, 2018-19, in part extending Hodder's eastern range of 2002-5). These developments incorporate a long lawn and beech hedges that reflect the character of the earlier gardens.