The Hall
Evening meals and special dinners are served in Wadham’s great hammer-beam-roofed hall.
Buildings
Wadham's historic and modern buildings, equipped with the latest facilities, are situated within beautiful grounds and gardens.
Wadham’s architectural heritage spans a variety of building styles from the classical Oxford Gothic of the original buildings to the contemporary lines of the new Undergraduate Centre.
Holywell Music Room
The oldest custom-built concert hall in Europe, The Holywell Music Room is a centre of culture at Wadham and can be booked for concerts, weddings, lectures and conferences.
Undergraduate & Access Centres
Wadham's beautiful new buildings were made possible through the generous donations of our alumni.
Graduate Centre
Wadham is one of the few Colleges with a dedicated centre for graduates.
Library
A calm 24/7 study space where you'll find books online or in hard copy as well as facilities to help you with your studies.
Gardens
Wadham’s gardens provide a place of calm, rest, and beauty for our community and visitors.
Accommodation
Main Site, Parks Road
First and third-year undergraduates are usually located on the Wadham College main site, in the centre of Oxford.
Dorothy Wadham Building
Beautiful and modern ensuite accommodation, and winner of the RIBA South Building of the Year 2021.
Merifield
Merifield houses a community of graduates and fourth-year undergraduates, and is the location of Wadham's sports field and sports pavillion.
Lathbury Road
This house, located in a quiet street off the Banbury Road, offers accommodation to five graduates.
Front Quad
The gothic style Front Quad comprising the Lodge, Warden's Lodgings, Hall, Chapel, Senior Common Room, function rooms and student accommodation, forms the oldest part of the College. Wadham’s main building was designed by architect, or master mason, William Arnold and erected between 1610 and 1613. The traditional Oxford Gothic style of the building is modified by classical decorative detail, most notably the ‘frontispiece’ (which faces visitors on entry to the College) framing statues of James I and founders, Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham. Classical, too, is the over-powering emphasis on symmetry. The central quadrangle, originally gravelled, was laid to lawn in 1809.
Bowra Building
Situated to the rear of the College site, the Bowra Building, designed by MacCormac, Jamieson & Pritchard, opened in 1992. It consciously evokes Elizabethan-Jacobean great houses, in order to relate to the main building. As well as student rooms it includes a cafeteria, seminar rooms, squash court and the Moser Theatre. Its narrow pedestrian ‘street’ manages to appropriate the bell-tower of New College as an impressive end-feature.
Other College buildings
Surrounding the informal 'back quad' are a variety of buildings. The large five-bay Donald Locke Staircase (staircase 9) was built as college rooms in 1693. Many of the other buildings are adapted for college purposes from other uses; they include a former warehouse which the Oxford University Press used for storing Bibles (staircases 10 and 11), the upper floors of the King's Arms Hotel (the ground floor still flourishes as a popular student pub) and several domestic buildings. The raised 'deck' on the south side was designed by the architects Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, and was inserted in 1970. It includes a small hidden quadrangle (the 'Holywell quad').