Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford Information

Lady Margaret Hall (LMH) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, located on the banks of the River Cherwell at Norham Gardens in north Oxford and adjacent to the University Parks. The college is more formally known under its current royal charter as "The Principal and Fellows of the College of the Lady Margaret in the University of Oxford".

The college was founded in 1878, closely collaborating with Somerville College. Both colleges opened their doors in 1879 as the first two womens colleges of Oxford. The college began admitting men in 1979. The college has just under 400 undergraduate students, around 200 postgraduate students and 24 visiting students. In 2016, the college became the only college in Oxford or Cambridge to offer a Foundation Year for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In 2018, Lady Margaret Hall ranked 21st out of 30 in Oxfords Norrington Table, a measurement of the performance of students in finals.

The colleges colours are blue, yellow and white. The college uses a coat of arms which accompanies the colleges motto "Souvent me Souviens", an Old French phrase meaning "I often remember" or "Think of me often", the motto of Lady Margaret Beaufort, for whom the college is named.

The current principal of the college is Alan Rusbridger. Notable alumni and students of Lady Margaret Hall include Benazir Bhutto, Michael Gove, Nigella Lawson, Josie Long, Ann Widdecombe and Malala Yousafzai.

In June 1878, the Association for the Higher Education of Women was formed, aiming for the eventual creation of a college for women in Oxford. Some of the more prominent members of the association were George Granville Bradley, Master of University College, T. H. Green, a prominent liberal philosopher and Fellow of Balliol College, and Edward Stuart Talbot, Warden of Keble College. Talbot insisted on a specifically Anglican institution, which was unacceptable to most of the other members. The two parties eventually split, and Talbots group founded Lady Margaret Hall, while T. H. Green founded Somerville College. Lady Margaret Hall opened its doors to its first nine students in 1879. The first 21 students from Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall attended lectures in rooms above a bakers shop on Little Clarendon Street. Despite the colleges High Anglican origins, not all students were devout Christians.

The college was named after Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII, patron of scholarship and learning. The first principal was Elizabeth Wordsworth, the great-niece of the poet William Wordsworth and daughter of Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln.

With a new building opening in 1894 the college expanded to 25 students.

The land on which the college is built was formerly part of the manor of Norham which belonged to St Johns College. The college bought the land from St Johns in 1894, the other institution driving a hard bargain and requiring a development price not only on the practical building land but also on the undevelopable water meadows. However, this land purchase marked a change in ambition from occupying residential buildings for teaching purposes to erecting buildings befitting an educational institution.

In 1897, members of Lady Margaret Hall founded the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement, as part of the settlement movement. It was a charitable initiative, originally a place for graduates from the college to live in North Lambeth where they would work with and help develop opportunities for the poor. Members of the college also helped found the Womens University Settlement, which continues to operate to this day, as the Blackfriars Settlement in south London.

Before 1920, the university refused to give academic degrees to women and would not acknowledge them as full members of the university. (Some of these women, nicknamed the steamboat ladies, were awarded ad eundem degrees by Trinity College Dublin, between 1904 and 1907.) In 1920 the first women graduated from the college at the Sheldonian Theatre and the principal at the time, Henrietta Jex-Blake, was given an honorary degree.

During the Second World War women were not permitted to fight on the front line and thus many of the students and fellows took up other roles to aid in the war effort, becoming nurses, firefighters and ambulance drivers. The Fellows Lawn was dug up and the students grew vegetables as part of the Dig for Victory campaign.

In 1979, one hundred years after its foundation, the college began admitting men as well as women; it was the first of the womens colleges to do so, along with St. Annes.

In 1919 J. R.R. Tolkien started to give private tuition to students at Oxford, including members of LMH where his tuition was much needed given the limited resources and tutors the college had in its early years. Later his daughter, Priscilla Tolkien, attended the college, graduating in 1951.

In 1948 Harper Lee, the future author of To Kill a Mockingbird, was a visiting student at LMH.

In 2017 Malala Yousafzai, the youngest-ever Nobel Prize Peace laureate and Pakistani campaigner for girls education, became a student of the college; she described the interview as "the hardest interview of [her] life", and received an offer of AAA in her A Levels. In the same year, prospective Chemistry student Brian White faced deportation at the hands of the Home Office, but was able to take up his place at the college.

Lady Margaret Hall is the only Oxford college to offer a foundation year; the scheme recruits students from minority and underrepresented backgrounds with A level grades lower than Oxford entry requirements. Students choose a subject to specialise in, and also take courses in study skills and other general subject areas, with the aim that they progress to an undergraduate degree at the college after a year of study. Pupils live in the college and have access to the same university facilities, both academic and social, as other students.

Modelled after a programme at Trinity College, Dublin, the four-year pilot scheme began in 2016 with ten students, seven of whom went on to study at Oxford, with the other three receiving offers from different Russell Group universities. It was praised by David Lammy, a Labour MP who said the foundation year is "exactly the sort of thing that needs to be done", and by Les Ebdon, director of Office for Fair Access, who described the programme as "innovative and important".

The development of the colleges buildings is perhaps best thought of as a zigzag beginning in the 1870s at the end of Norham Gardens and making its way down towards the River Cherwell and then running back towards Norham Gardens forming quadrangles on the return journey. The following account of the buildings moves through the college as these spaces emerge for a visitor entering the college at the Porters Lodge and walking to the river - because of the way the college developed the dates and styles of the buildings enclosing the quadrangles are not all of a piece.

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