Rhodes House

SP5106NE SOUTH PARKS ROAD (South side) 612-0/6/115 Rhodes House 12/01/54

GV II*

Educational establishment. 1929, by Sir Herbert Baker. Coursed Bladon stone rubble with Chipsham dressings. Stone slate hipped roofs behind balustraded parapets. Ashlar stacks. H-shaped plan, in the C17 style of the region, with great hall in the central range and reading rooms, library and stairs in the west wing; in the forecourt to the north a Classical rotunda with a copper-clad dome and a tetrastyle portico, two colums deep. Over the centre of the main range an open cupola. Stone mullion-transom windows with leaded panes. The south garden front has a large canted bay window to the hall at the centre with buttresses and carved armorial tablets to left and right. INTERIOR: The portico leads to the stone domed rotunda with windows in the drum with columns in antis. From the rotunda, a vaulted anteroom to the great hall with ashlar walls, an apse at the high end, gallery on pairs of Tuscan columns at the low end and an arch-braced roof with crown-posts. An axial corridor leads to the wings; the west wing contains reading rooms and the timber open-well staircase with shaped balusters and carved eagle finials; on the first floor the library [Rosebury Room] is open to a similar roof to that of the hall. NOTE: Rhodes House is a memorial to Cecil Rhodes and home of the Rhodes Trustees in Oxford. It was established in the will of Cecil Rhodes as a centre for scholars from the U.S.A., the British Empire and Germany.

Listing NGR: SP5151906809