The St John Street area is a residential area close to the city centre in Oxford, England. It consists of two streets, St John Street and Beaumont Buildings. Wellington Square is to the north, Pusey Street to the east, and Beaumont Street to the south. It is an area of terraced houses developed in about 1830 as part of the same scheme as Beaumont Street.
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St John Street is a street in central Oxford, England. The street mainly consists of Georgian-style stone-faced Grade II listed terraced houses. It was built as a speculative development by St John's College starting in the 1820s and finishing in the 1840s at the start of the Victorian era.
At the northern end is Rewley House and near the southern end is the Sackler Library, which opened in 2001. To the south is Beaumont Street and to the north is Wellington Square. St John Street runs parallel with St Giles' to the east and Walton Street to the west.
Note that part of Merton Street was once known as St John Street.
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The Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library holds a large portion of the classical, art historical, and archaeological works belonging to the University of Oxford, England.
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The Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, formerly the Faculty of Oriental Studies, is an academic department of the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England, United Kingdom.
The faculty is engaged in a broad range of research and teaching on modern and historical Asian and Middle Eastern studies, focusing on politics, language, and culture. The faculty's main building is located on Pusey Lane near the Ashmolean Museum and Sackler Library, with some research centres of the faculty having their own buildings elsewhere in Oxford. The faculty is part of the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. The Nizami Ganjavi Library is the faculty's own library for students and professors, which is both a lending library and a reading room of the Bodleian Library.
The faculty was known as the Faculty of Oriental Studies until 1 August 2022, when the name was changed to Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. The name was changed due to its perceived colonial implications.
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Pusey Street links the wide thoroughfare of St Giles' Street to the east with St John Street to the west in the St John Street area of central Oxford, England. Pusey Street, formerly called Alfred Street, was renamed in honour of Edward Bouverie Pusey in 1926. The renaming also avoided confusion with another Alfred Street to the south.
The street is about 150 yards long and is one-way eastbound for most of its length.
The street is bordered by two educational establishments of Oxford University. On the north side of the street is the Permanent Private Hall of Regent's Park College. This includes a large white building on the corner with St Giles' called Wheeler Robinson House, the ground floor of which is occupied by an Oxfam bookshop.
To the south are St Cross College and Pusey House, founded in 1884. Pusey House Chapel is on the corner with St Giles'.
Pusey Lane off Pusey Street was renamed from Alfred Lane at the same time as Pusey Street was renamed. MG Cars of Morris Motors manufactured the MG 14/28 car here from 1924 until the move to larger premises in Bainton Road, North Oxford, in September 1925.
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Beaumont Palace, built outside the north gate of Oxford, was intended by Henry I about 1130 to serve as a royal palace conveniently close to the royal hunting-lodge at Woodstock. Its former presence is recorded in Beaumont Street, Oxford. Set into a pillar on the north side of the street, near Walton Street, is a stone with the inscription: "Near to this site stood the King's Houses later known as Beaumont Palace. King Richard I was born here in 1157 and King John in 1167." The "King's House" was the range of the palace that contained the king's lodgings.
Henry spent Easter 1133 in the nova aula – his "new hall" at Beaumont – in great pomp, celebrating the birth of his grandson, the future Henry II. Edward I was the last king to sojourn in Beaumont officially as a palace, and in 1275 he granted it to an Italian lawyer, Francesco Accorsi, who had undertaken diplomatic missions for him. When Edward II was put to flight at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, he is said to have invoked the Virgin Mary and vowed to found a monastery for the Carmelites if he might escape safely. In fulfilment of his vow he remanded Beaumont Palace to the Carmelites in 1318.
In 1318, the Palace was the scene for the beginnings of the John Deydras affair, in which a royal pretender, arguing that he was the rightful king of England, claimed the Palace for his own. John Deydras was ultimately executed for sedition.
When the White Friars were disbanded at the Reformation, most of the structure was dismantled and the building stone reused in Christ Church and St John's College. An engraving of 1785 shows the remains of Beaumont Palace, the last of which were destroyed in the laying out of Beaumont Street in 1829.
Sources and further reading
Chance, Eleanor; Colvin, Christina; Cooper, Janet; Day, C.J.; Hassall, T.G.; Selwyn, Nesta (1979). Crossley, Alan; Elrington, C.R. (eds.). Victoria County History: A History of the County of Oxford, Volume 4. Sherwood, Jennifer; Pevsner, Nikolaus (1974). The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. p. 324. ISBN 0-14-071045-0. Tyack, Geoffrey (1998). Oxford An Architectural Guide. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. p. 204. ISBN 0-19-817423-3.
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