From Studium to Station

This report presents the results of over 40 years of excavation, historic building survey and documentary research that have been carried out by Oxford Archaeology and others at the site of the Cistercian house of Rewley, a chantry founded in 1281. It became an abbey and studium providing accommodation for monks studying at the university, and can therefore claim to be one of Oxford’s earliest colleges. The railway station that subsequently occupied the site in 1851 followed the design of the Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition, and was the last surviving representative of that internationally important building.