Blue Boar Quad At Christ Church

This is a college residence built between 1965 and 1968 by Powell and Moya, with Charles Weiss and Partners as engineers. The building is constructed with brick and thermolite cross walls, featuring Portland Whitbed and Roach stone dressings. Exposed pre-cast concrete floor slabs, cills, and transoms incorporate a bush hammered finish with calcined flint aggregate, and the structure is characterized by solid stone quoins and lead panels. It has a leaded roof with projecting tank houses and sloping penthouse roofs.

The building occupies a long, narrow, concealed site, enclosed by a high stone wall to the north and Peckwater Quad to the east, with access to the south through Canons' gardens and Killcanon. It has an irregular ‘C’ shaped plan arranged around four staircases, providing two and three storeys of undergraduate accommodation—61 bedsits—above a semi-basement archive storage and common room. Eight two-bedroom lecturers' sets are located in the attic. The ground floor has been partially excavated and the quad is entered via a ramp. Staircases are accessed from both the east facade and from the inner courtyard via archways.

The design incorporates wide bays of double-glazed aluminium sliding windows with a black anodized finish, set back behind deep cills and broad stone piers. Interior staircases have three undergraduate rooms per floor, with aluminium balustrading and tiled floors; the rooms are either long with a double aspect or south-facing and more square. Interiors have not been inspected. A plaque dated MCMLXVIII is located in an archway, commemorating the building’s opening by The Queen in May 1968; a separate, listed plaque commemorates the same event on an adjoining wall. Steps at the western end of the courtyard lead to the entrance of the furthest staircase. A basement level contains a seminar room, originally intended as a bookstore, and a muniment room. The building abuts a long stone wall to Blue Boar Street at the rear. Corridors, study bedrooms, and two-room penthouses feature long fixed benches designed by the architects, full-height built-in cupboards, and doors.

The structure is conceived as a continuous line bent through right-angles to form three enclosed or partly enclosed quads of varying sizes, with hard landscaping. The design is influenced by Powell and Moya's earlier addition to Brasenose College (1959) and is a smaller, more detailed version of their contemporary Cripps Building at St John’s College, Cambridge (1964-6). Within the historic courtyards of Christ Church, Blue Boar Quad is inwardly separate and distinct, yet interconnects, while outwardly, it represents a bold addition to the townscape.