New Oxford digs have solar panels, heat pumps — and dishwashers

A University of Oxford college, which has been home to students since the 13th century, has been given a 21st-century makeover. Now the first residents have moved into its newest accommodation — and the college principal is palpably excited.   

“If you look up there,” says Baroness (Kathy) Willis, principal of St Edmund Hall and professor of biodiversity, “you can see that little rectangular hole. It’s a bat box.” Scratch that, “I think it is a bat hotel now. I just hope our students like bats, is all I can say.”  

Before construction of the new accommodation blocks began, ecologists recorded 12 bats on the site. Afterwards, one of the college fellows “counted 117 bats emerging from the bat box” on one evening, Willis says. “Isn’t that brilliant?”     

Teddy Hall, as it is affectionately known, is the oldest academic society at the University of Oxford — and indeed, at any university in the world — to have continuously housed undergraduates (since about 1278). Although it is believed St Edmund of Abingdon, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, first taught here in around 1190-1200.   

In modern times, famous alumni have included the former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer, Philippine president Bongbong Marcos, the Monty Python star Terry Jones and the House of the Dragon actress Emma D’Arcy. And, of course, the bats.    

Willis is giving me a tour of St Edmund’s satellite site at Norham Gardens in north Oxford, where a £43m, three-year project to build 127 student bedrooms completed last month. It includes Passivhaus blocks (which reach a strict certified standard for energy performance) that use 70 per cent less energy than a standard new-build, and a low-energy makeover of a Victorian villa offering practical lessons for anyone wanting to upgrade a period home.

Residents were “very interested” in the upgrades to the Victorian villa, says Naila Yousuf, of Wright & Wright, the project architects. An open day scheduled to finish at 8pm went on to 11pm as residents kept asking questions about measures you might try as “a normal person” at your own period home.    

It inspired Willis, too, to consider insulation, solar panels and a heat pump at her own 1900s home in Summertown, a suburb of the city. “I’m thinking about what I do in my house, to try and do what we’ve done here … at an affordable cost,” says Willis, who sits in the House of Lords as a crossbencher. “If it’s going to cost you even more money than you’re already paying on your energy and you’re not going to get it back for 20 years, nobody in their right mind is going to, because they won’t even live in that house for 20 years probably. So you have to find that middle ground.”  

About the college project: “People said, ‘Oh, that’d be expensive,’ you know, sharp intake of breath.” Yet it was completed on time and within budget to “the last penny”, which shows “it doesn’t have to have all the noughts added on the end the minute you say it’s going to be environmentally sustainable”, she says.     

Dating from 1874, the villa was among the first large Victorian houses built in what is now a conservation area in north Oxford. This meant planners would not allow them to insulate walls on the outside, so they had to do so on the inside.  

This is tricky. Get it wrong and you’d leave those lovely old walls riddled with damp and mould.   

To avoid such disaster, the design team used breathable, natural materials to insulate internally: wood fibre insulation, cork and lime-based insulating plaster. (Modern plastic paints and waterproof cement mortar are a no-no in old buildings, which need to breathe.)   

They also modelled the dew point — the exact spot inside the wall where warm, humid indoor air cools down enough to condense its vapour into water droplets. You don’t want that to happen in the wrong part of the wall.

Yousuf advises anyone upgrading a period home to first do such moisture modelling. “Most people don’t realise how buildings work. They’re kind of living, in a way,” she says.     

The villa’s old single-glazed windows were replaced with double-glazed wooden sashes. In the highly airtight and super-insulated new buildings, windows are triple glazed, from the Danish brand Idealcombi.   

Green roofs with 74 solar panels, invisible from ground level, supply 11 per cent of the site’s electrical demand.

Five large air source heat pumps, hidden between gables at the top of the new buildings, supply heating and hot water for the whole site. It means they burn no fossil fuels.    

What look like large chimneys contain not fireplaces, but a clean, contemporary update: ducting for the mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR) system. It pumps out stale indoor air, extracts heat from it and uses that to warm fresh incoming air from outdoors.     

The new buildings were constructed from cross-laminated timber panels, built in a factory and craned into place.

All this was done “at the same cost as putting up a modern build,” Willis says. “But things that we didn’t cut costs on [were] features to make it look beautiful.”     

Like 85,000 hung tiles of Sussex red clay, each bearing the handprint of its maker at Keymer, Britain’s last manufacturer of handmade tiles. And 200,000 light red bricks, hand-thrown in Swanage, Dorset, and laid in a traditional Flemish bond pattern.     

All rainwater drains from the rooftops to a new ecology pond. Rare trees, such as the Franklin tree (Franklinia alatamaha) which is extinct in the wild, were sourced from Kew and other botanical gardens to grow at St Edmund’s.

Biodiversity on the site increased by 88 per cent, according to Willis. “For me as a biodiversity scientist, it’s an absolute delight. But it also shows what’s possible even on a really small site.”     

Generous garden squares sit between the buildings, giving all the student residents a green view. Doors painted in the RAL colour Reed Green bring nature into their 14 sq m (150 sq ft) rooms — almost all with en suite showers. They even have dishwashers (rather than teetering piles of mouldy plates around sinks) in the kitchens shared between every six to ten rooms.     

“Honestly, these students are going to live in heaven,” Willis says.  

Rooms around the medieval quadrangle at St Edmund’s main site in central Oxford used to be the college’s most popular ones. “Not anymore,” Willis says. The new rooms “went immediately” in the ballot for accommodation, where they were “top of the list”.     

“The students want the nice, comfortable rooms with the dishwashers [and] en suites. Then they can walk through the lovely historical quads. But actually, comfort is very high, as it should be,” she adds.   

The first students moved in on Saturday. Increasing the bedrooms from the 56 formerly on site to 127 now means St Edmund can house all its undergraduates, freeing up homes for private rent in Oxford.     

Willis says: “I hope that every student who lives here… will go forward thinking, ‘This is possible. We can do this… in the climate crisis and the nature crisis. And I know how because I’ve lived in it.’”