Oxford Union - Union Buildings

Union Buildings

The Oxford Union buildings are located in Frewin Court, off Cornmarket Street, and on St Michael's Street. The original Union buildings were designed by Alfred Waterhouse and opened in 1879. This was about a decade after the completion of the Cambridge Union's premises, also designed by Waterhouse, and the exterior of the two buildings is very similar.

A debating chamber was subsequently added, but the Union's growing membership meant that it became too small, and is now the "Old Library". The Old Library is best known for its Pre-Raphaelite paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, known as the Oxford Union murals. The current debating chamber, and several further extensions to the main buildings were added over the next forty years. The final extension was designed in a conventional Gothic Revival style by Walter Mills and Thorpe and built in 1910-11. It provides a dining room and a second library, together with basement library stacks.

Many of the rooms in the Union are named after figures from the Union's past, such as the Goodman Library, with its oriel windows, and the wood-panelled MacMillan Room with barrel ceiling. The buildings have gradually been added to with paintings and statues of past presidents and prominent members.

The Gladstone Room also contains William Ewart Gladstone's original cabinet table, semi-circular in design so that he could look all his ministers in the eye as he held forth.

In the debating chamber there are busts of such notables as Roy Jenkins, Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine, George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston and William Ewart Gladstone. There is also a grand piano in the debating chambers known as the "Bartlet-Jones Piano" after the Oxford University Music Society president who found it dusty and forgotten in a cupboard in the Holywell Music Room and placed it on permanent loan to the Union. The piano was unveiled by Vladimir Ashkenazy, who famously refused to play it in front of the packed chamber because he "had not warmed up". The despatch boxes which continue to be used in Union debates are modelled on those in the House of Commons, and were offered to the House during World War II.

The buildings were used as a location for the films Oxford Blues (1984) and The Madness of King George (1994).