The Townsend Building

The Townsend Building

A university science building and laboratory constructed between 1908 and 1910, designed by T G Jackson. The building is constructed in red brick and stone with ashlar dressings, with a coursed rubble ground floor.

The building is executed in the English Renaissance style, featuring bright red-orange brickwork and ashlar stonework. The main façade, set back from Parks Road, comprises three storeys with projecting wings either side of a five-bay centre. The central three bays form an ashlar centrepiece with attached columns and a pediment, displaying coats of arms of the University of Oxford and the Drapers' Company with heavy carved garlands below and around the second-floor windows. The wings and side bays of the central range have brick first and second floors over stone ground floors, with slightly projecting ashlar central bays containing four-light windows to either floor; those on the second floor have applied columns supporting pediments with carved laurel wreaths. On the left-hand wing, to the left of the entrance, a stone plaque with bronze oval inset records the Drapers' Company endowment of the building. The slate roof, hipped over the side wings, is pierced by very small dormer windows.

The building was originally free-standing. A rear (east) extension was added in the 1960s (the Simon Building), and the building is now abutted to the north by the Sir Martin Wood lecture theatre of 2000, which itself adjoins the 1948 Clarendon Laboratory. These later extensions are not of special interest.

The central doorway opens into a hallway with stone detailing combining neo-Classical arched openings and late medieval carved panels. From here a double-height stone double staircase rises the full height of the building through two storeys, detailed throughout with stone arches over its turns, decorative iron and stone screens to the side, and stone columns at its second-floor head supporting the ceiling with a central octagonal dome. High-quality joinery includes grand door cases in the 17th-century style. A lecture theatre that originally occupied the first and second floors, off the centre of the staircase, has been subdivided with an inserted floor into a laboratory and workrooms. At second-floor level is a doorcase into a room that has been infilled, but which still shows the bases of riveted steel trusses.

The Science Area, on the north-east fringe of Oxford, began to develop in the 1860s after the university instituted an Honour School in Natural Science in 1850. The Townsend Building, also known as the Second Electrical Laboratory, stands towards the north edge of the Science Area, south of the Clarendon Laboratory. It was funded by the Drapers' Company and designed by T G Jackson (1835–1924; created baronet in 1913), who pioneered the study and revival of English Renaissance architecture and made the Jacobean/English Renaissance style fashionable in Oxford from the 1870s onwards, earning the styles the nicknames 'Jacksonbethan' and 'Anglo-Jackson'. The building was completed in the year Jackson won the RIBA Gold Medal and was the first detached building to extend beyond the Museum boundary into the park beyond.

The experimental physicist H G J Moseley carried out experiments in this building that established the ordering of the elements in terms of their atomic numbers. It is considered that this work would almost certainly have gained him a Nobel Prize, had he not been killed in 1915 at Gallipoli.