Cotuit Hall
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cotuit Hall is one of the nine halls of residence at Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, England. Located on Pullens Lane in Headington, a few minutes walk away from the Gipsy Lane campus, it houses 102 students in single rooms, with full catering.
[edit] History
The house itself was originally named Napier House after its commissioner and first occupant, Arthur Sampson Napier. A Fellow of Merton College and Professor of English Language and Literature, he employed the architect Harry Wilkinson Moore to design a house for him, his wife, their six children, and four servants. The house was to be built on land he had recently purchased on Headington Hill, an area of growing favour among Oxford academics. The house was completed in 1892, and Napier lived there with his family until his death in 1916.
Napier House was then bought at auction by Headington School, who used the building to house their junior department. In 1930, the senior school moved into new buildings, and the junior section moved into its current location on the south side of London Road (where the senior school had previously been). The name of Napier House moved with the school.
The building, thus vacated, reverted for a time to being a private dwelling, and was given its current name of Cotuit Hall. In this period, it was occupied by Redvers Opie, Fellow and Tutor in Economics at Magdalen College.
From the 1940s until about 1955, Cotuit Hall was the City of Oxford Children's Home.
In the late 1950s, it again became a private house, occupied by the Revd D. B. Jones, but by 1962 it had become a Hostel of the College of Technology, which later became the Polytechnic and then Oxford Brookes University.
