St Mary's University, Twickenham
St Mary's was founded in Hammersmith in 1850 by the Catholic church to train teachers for its poor schools — making it the oldest Catholic higher-education institution in the United Kingdom. It moved to Strawberry Hill in 1925, took university status in 2014, and remains small by conviction: one campus, one hill.
The campus adjoins Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill House — the gothic folly that launched the Gothic Revival in the 1750s — and the university uses the neighbourhood's strange, theatrical architecture as a daily backdrop. Its endurance performance centre has trained a generation of distance runners, Mo Farah among them.
Field notes
- Strawberry Hill House next door began the Gothic Revival — Walpole wrote the first Gothic novel in it.
- Pope Benedict XVI visited the campus in 2010 — the first papal visit to a British university.
- Its endurance centre has been the training base of Olympic champions.
Notable connections
In brief — from the field guide
The oldest Catholic university in the UK, founded as a teacher-training college in 1850 — now on a leafy campus beside Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill, and a quietly serious school of sport science.
The live encyclopaedia brief loads when available · read the full article · reused under CC BY-SA