The History Faculty Library, and one History Research group, now occupy the building which previously housed the University of Oxford’s Indian Institute (the rest of the Faculty having moved to the Old Boys' High School in the summer of 2007). The aim of the Indian Institute was ‘the work of fostering and facilitating Indian studies in the University; the work of making Englishmen, and even Indians themselves, appreciate better than they have done before the languages, literature and industries of India’.

This postcard, which dates from soon after 1900, shows the large building that used to be the Indian Institute on the corner of Holywell and Catte Street .

The first section of this building was constructed in 1883, on the corner site which had been cleared by demolishing the former Seal’s Coffee House, a handsome building dating from the early eighteenth century.

In 1896 six adjoining shops (including Turner Brothers, tobacconists and F. H. Plummer, a prominent bookseller) were demolished so that the three right-hand bays shown in the above postcard could be added to the Institute. As well as a library and lecture rooms, the enlarged building contained a museum, whose contents are now in the Ashmolean.

In 1903 Hertford College demolished the remaining shops shown on the right of the above postcard and advanced northwards (closing the gap caused by New College Lane with the new ‘Bridge of Sighs’) to become the Institute’s semi-detached neighbour.

Since the Indian Institute had been paid for by funds collected privately in India and Britain, there was some controversy in 1968 when its library was moved to a specially constructed penthouse on top of the New Bodleian so that the original building could be taken over by the central University Offices. When these in turn moved to Wellington Square, Oxford’s History Faculty took over the building.

The Indian Institute was built of Milton stone ‘in the style of the English Renaissance, with some Oriental details’ to the designs of Basil Champneys. Nikolas Pevsner remarked in 1974 that ‘the rounded corner cupola makes an excellent point de vue at the east end of Broad Street’, but earlier writers were less kind. John Betjeman dismissed it in 1938 as an ‘everlasting yellow building’, and when in 1962 it was threatened with demolition the Oxford Times wrote, ‘Champneys’ Indian Institute looks like departing unmourned, having just lasted long enough to deliver its site to a generation of architects capable of doing something robust enough to fill it’.

There are still many signs of the original use of the building: outside there are Hindu demigods and the heads of tigers and an elephant, and an elephant with a howdah form the weathercock.

- Stephanie Jenkins

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