Eagle Eye Magazine Issue 1 2023

THE OLD
LODGE
Photo: David Fisher
Governing Body (GB) and Buildings Committee
Minutes show that the old Porters’ Lodge was
constructed at some point shortly after 1906. Until
then, the main entrance to the College had been on
Queen’s Lane, likely a hang-over from the medieval buildings,
since the main gate had been on the east side of College at that
time, opposite what is now the entrance to Teddy Hall. This
set-up was deemed ‘unsatisfactory’ in a report presented to GB in
December 1906. The entrance on Queen’s Lane was henceforth to
be reserved for ‘servants, tradespeople, for luggage and goods, for
vehicular traffic, and for admission after Midnight’.
As you can see from old photographs from the early 1900s
(see Front Quad, Queen’s College, Oxford, Oxfordshire, 1903. Artist: Henry Taunt
on gettyimages.co.uk) the set-up in Front Quad was originally
quite different: while the small wooden structure appears to be
the same one that was tacked on to the end of the post room in
the old Porters’ Lodge, it was positioned directly under the cupola,
rather than to the west of the main entrance.
Size was a recurring issue with the old Porter’s Lodge: too
small for comfort or for sorting the post, but evidently large
enough that, in 1925, GB empowered the Dean to put up notices
forbidding undergraduates from loitering at the Lodge and ‘using
it as a waiting room’.
But the general unsuitability of the space was recognised more
implicitly in plans for building work from the 1950s onwards,
when it was listed (fairly near the bottom) on a proposed schedule
of work to be undertaken in College.
Photo: David Fisher
In the mid-1960s, after the new Provost’s Lodgings had been built
and when the work on the Queen’s Lane Annexe (i.e. Carrodus
Quad) was well underway, the College began to think more
seriously about rebuilding the Porters’ Lodge. We have a letter
from this period from the College organist who appealed to
the Buildings Committee for the Lodge to be rebuilt, citing its
unattractiveness and the impractically small space available to the
porters, especially for sorting the post.
The College engaged the architect Marshall Sisson, who had
recently overseen the redesign of the Queen’s Lane Annexe, to
offer proposals for a new Porters’ Lodge and for improvements
to the Night Porter’s lodgings near the entrance into College on
Queen’s Lane. Sisson proposed that two structures should be built
on the south side of Front Quad, one on either side of the main
entrance between the cloister wall and the supporting pillar of
the cupola, creating two separate spaces: one to house the porters
and another to serve as a space to sort the post. Nothing came of
this proposal, however. In 1970, there was some further discussion
by the Buildings Committee of altering the Lodge to expedite the
process of sorting post, and even of moving the main entrance
to College back to Queen’s Lane, although neither suggestion
was adopted.
After 1970, there were sporadic suggestions that the Porters’ Lodge
should be redesigned (and in 1980, the Clerk of Works drew up
another scheme for the transfer of the Lodge back over to the
Queen’s Lane entrance) but these never went very far. It looks
as though other building projects always cropped up which
overshadowed interest in the lodge project.
It’s perhaps surprising to note the Lodge’s relatively recent
relocation to the High Street but there is further confirmation
of this in an article from the 1938 Record, which ponders the
differences between ‘modern’ Queen’s and the College during
the 1880s:
‘It seems strange to us to think of the quiet Oxford of the 1880s, the Front
Quad with its gas-lamps, a gravelled Back Quad not yet floodlit, the porter’s
lodge not as now in the High, but at the side-door in Queen’s Lane, so that
you drew up your hansom there on the first day of term, paid off the driver,
and bundled your bags in through the narrow entrance way as you inquired
the way to your rooms.’
Amy Ebrey, Assistant Archivist
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