St Catherine's College Bicycle Store

St Catherine's College Bicycle Store is located at St Catherine's College in the city of Oxford, in England. Designed by Arne Jacobsen in the 1960s, the structure is a Grade I listed building. One of some fifteen such bike sheds listed by Historic England, it is the only one to hold the highest, Grade I, designation.

History
The predecessor of St Catherine's College, Oxford was instituted in 1868, to enable students from poorer backgrounds to attend the university without taking on the expense of enrolling in a college. St Catherine's gained full college status in 1962 and is now the university's largest. The driving force for the college's development was its first master, the historian Alan Bullock. Plans for the college were begun in the 1950s and the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen was chosen to develop the site on Holywell Great Meadow just to the north of the city centre. Jacobsen oversaw every aspect of the college's design, and the bicycle shed is an example of his close attention to all elements of student life. The architectural merit of the college and its grounds was recognised in 1993 when the college campus was designated as a Grade I listed site. Some individual buildings on the site have their own listings, including the bicycle shed, and the college gardens are listed at Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England.

Description
The bicycle shed is circular in design, built in yellow brick laid in a stretcher bond, and roofed. The brick used, here and elsewhere, was the subject of considerable debate. Jacobsen originally insisted on bricks of Danish manufacture, before eventually conceding that one type of English brick, from Uxbridge, would suffice. Even then, he required a non-standard dimension for their manufacture, and imported Danish bricklayers to instruct the English labourers. The store was constructed between 1963 and 1964. Its Grade I listing makes it unique among the roughly fifteen such bike sheds which are listed. Historic England, in its discussion of the listings, recalled Nikolaus Pevsner's opening to his An Outline of European Architecture, published in 1943; "a bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture". Pevsner's comment was echoed by Jacobsen in an interview given in the month before his death in 1971 [see box].