FOR LONG LIFE

Evening Post, Issue 60, 11 March 1936, Page 20

FOR LONG LIFE

UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS

London University's new £3,000,000 headquarters are slowly emerging from a maze of '-< scaffolding, cranes, and hoardings. By comparison, other great structures of brick arid cement seem to spring up in a night. But there is purpose behind the slow progress on the Bloomsbury Square site where work began in July, 1934, states an exchange. The great edifice is being built to endure like the beautiful 500----year-old colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which still reflect the glory of the architecture of their period; The walls of the " new building, which are of brick, are being made far thicker than the reinforced concrete walls which are now used in many office blocks. . Mr. Farrar Brown, Assistant Clerk to the Court of the University, told a newspaper correspondent that the first portion of the building is expected to be ready for occupation by 1937. This portion constitutes about one-third of the total building, and is to be devoted mainly to the administrative work of the University which is at present carried out at the. Imperial Institute BuildIngs in South Kensington. Work will continue on the rest of the building as steadily as funds permit. The first block will probably cost £1,000,000, and the cost of the complete building is estimated at about £3,000,000. The site was purchased for £525,000 with the assistance of a gift of £400,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation of America. i University of London, the largest university in the British Empire, is comprised of forty colleges scattered all over London, and as far away as the South-eastern Agricultural College at Wye, in the centre of Kent, and the Richmond Methodist College, in northwest' Surrey. All these colleges are controlled directly or indirectly from the Imperial Institute, which for many years has had insufficient space for the task.

The buildings which are being erected in Bloomsbury are to be used mainly for various institutions and activities for which inadequate or no accommodation exists at present. These include the University Library, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Institute of Education.

The first block is to contain the offices of the administrative staff, large Senate rooms, courtrooms, a refectory, and a great lecture hall. At the top of the building the university library is to be housed. Although the library will have the best situation in the building some regret is expressed by the authorities that the whole building could not have been built higher than the 80 feet restriction imposed by law in London, since it is held desirable to remove, the library and lecture halls, as far away from the dust and noise of the streets below as possible. Special permission was obtained by the University to build a tower," to the height of 210 feet. Although it will not be possible to transfer to the new building any of the colleges of the. University, Mr. Brown explained, Birkbeck College and the School of Oriental Studies have been included provisionally in the building scheme. Birkbeck College Is one of the few colleges of university rank in Britain which is devoted exclusively to the education of evening 'students. The. buildings at the Imperial Institute, Mr. Brown said, are to be retained and used for- examination .purposes,