Hall Celebrates One Year Anniversary of £50m HALLmarks Campaign

St Edmund Hall marks its one-year anniversary since the public launch of ‘HALLmarks: Forged by the Hall’, a £50m Campaign that will deliver vital and visionary investment in the physical, intellectual, pastoral and cultural aspects of the 800-year-old college. The Hall has raised 23% of its total to date and is very grateful for the continued generosity and support of its Aularian community.

The campaign is forged around eight HALLmarks representing the enduring and emerging components of St Edmund Hall’s DNA and community: Camaraderie, Creativity, Curiosity, Community, Conservation, Continuity, Care and Connection. Each HALLmark is linked to our fundraising priority areas so that alumni and friends alike can choose to align their support with those values that resonate most with them as individuals.

An exciting part of the HALLmarks campaign is to raise funds to enable the College to develop a new environmentally sustainable ‘quadrangle’ for the Hall at Norham Gardens. In January 2023, the Hall secured planning permission to build and redevelop 128 study bedrooms and communal facilities accommodated in a mixture of new buildings and a remodelled Victorian villa, at the College’s Norham St Edmund (NSE) site in north Oxford.

‘This once-in-a-generation development for the Hall of study bedrooms and communal facilities embodies care for two precious things – our students and our planet. It will enable the Hall to meet its goal of accommodating all our undergraduates, inspire a creative and inclusive college culture and lead the way in environmentally sustainable design’. Professor Baroness (Kathy) Willis, CBE, Principal, St Edmund Hall

The new student accommodation will be a pioneering model of sustainability, with new construction designed to rigorous Passivhaus standards, and the Victorian villa retrofitted to equivalent low-energy EnerPHit principles. The landscape and ecology strategy is designed to improve and enhance biodiversity, with an 80% net gain over the site. Norham St Edmund will be vital in promoting social interaction and wellbeing with and between undergraduates and postgraduates who will share the communal facilities. All communal spaces will have a direct connection to the gardens, opening out to the back gardens. Construction will commence in summer of 2023, and the project is due to be completed in 2025-26.

The Principal, with the Development and Alumni Relations team, has been sharing the latest news and stories from the Hall and promoting the HALLmarks campaign to alumni around the world this year. In addition to the annual gatherings at the New York Dinner in December 2022 and the London Dinner in February 2023, Teddy Hall has met Aularians in California, Canada and Switzerland. We have also been delighted to see many alumni return to the Hall for the Alumni Summer Dinner and anniversary dinners, as well as at the Floreat Aula Legacy Society Dinner in March 2023. Aularians are welcome to register for the upcoming HALLmarks Gala: Alumni Summer Dinner on Saturday 24 June.

The Development and Alumni Relations team also held the first HALLmarks North America Giving Day in October 2022 to raise funds for the campaign key priorities, including the Norham St Edmund Development, scholarships, bursaries and accessibility.

We look forward to sharing more campaign updates with Aularians on progress with the Norham St Edmund development and HALLmarks campaign in the months ahead. If any alumni have questions about the campaign or would like to know how to be more involved, please contact Andrew Vivian, Fellow & Director of Development at andrew.vivian@seh.ox.ac.uk or +44 (0)1865 279096. You can also visit the HALLmarks campaign website to donate.