Vision
The University’s buildings and estate are not only necessary for our academic work; they also contribute to Oxford’s reputation as a place of learning, heritage and culture. They form a vital part of the city’s rich architecture and provide a beautiful environment for visitors and local people, as well as University staff and students.
The University’s estate comprises some 275 buildings in and around Oxford that are used for research, teaching, learning, and administration. These provide total internal space of around 640,000m2.
We aim to provide our staff and students with state-of-the-art facilities that are comfortable, pleasant and well-suited to their academic purpose, while also fitting gracefully into their historic setting.
Our buildings should help academics make the breakthroughs that are needed to address the key challenges facing humanity, and are designed to foster interdisciplinary working, collaboration and knowledge sharing. We invest in the estate to enable new and better ways of working.
We work to minimise the University’s environmental impact, with policies on sustainability underpinning every aspect of how we manage the estate.
We also have a duty to preserve our historic buildings, and we carry out regular maintenance and conservation work to ensure Oxford’s architectural heritage is handed down to the next generation in good condition.
We have numerous building and refurbishment projects ongoing at any one time, with an annual expenditure of more than £100m. This cost is met through a combination of University funds, Government grants and initiatives, and donations. We are also in a long-term strategic partnership with Legal & General, which supports our efforts to create innovation districts and build housing for staff and graduate students.
The University has masterplans in place for sites of strategic importance such as Old Road Campus, the Science Area, the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter and Begbroke Innovation District. These ensure that development in these areas moves forward under a consistent long-term vision, delivering the greatest possible benefits both to the University and the wider community.
Strategy
The University of Oxford has grown over eight centuries among publicly and privately owned buildings, including homes and businesses, in a very compact city. This creates very different challenges to those campus universities face.
While we need to continue to develop in order to achieve the University’s vision, we are also mindful of our impact on the local community.
The management and development of the estate is driven by the University’s Estate Strategy which sets out key principles in line with the University’s Strategic Plan. It reflects the key challenges facing the higher education sector and this University, addresses the impact of issues around efficiency and sustainability, and outlines plans for future developments.
Key priorities include:
- To provide facilities that both support world-leading teaching, research, innovation and public engagement today, and give us flexibility to adapt to changes in our needs and the wider higher education landscape over the coming decades.
- To bring the entire estate to a consistently excellent standard, so that all buildings are comfortable, well-suited to supporting the University’s academic mission, and sustainable in both environmental and financial terms.
- To improve the utilisation of space through new buildings designed for flexibility and shared use, and through sharing existing teaching and research facilities more effectively.
- To further improve our approach to managing and maintaining the estate, making better use of data to ensure our resources are directed where they are needed most.
- To be responsible stewards of Oxford’s precious built environment, taking good care of our historic buildings with sensitive, regular conservation work.
- To help reach net zero and a positive overall impact on biodiversity by 2035, in line with the University’s Environmental Sustainability Strategy.
We are currently focusing our resources on facilities that are nearing the end of their usable lives.
Where possible we do this by refurbishing existing facilities, to retain the carbon they embody and avoid the environmental impact of new construction.
However, turning legacy buildings into high-performing modern facilities is not always possible, and we undertake large-scale construction projects where this is best way to provide the high-quality, flexible facilities needed to support our academic mission over the decades to come.