Trustee Charles D Seligman, handed the new building over from developers Wooldridge and Simpson to the University of Oxford, at an opening ceremony attended by the Vice Chancellor on Friday 11 March 1927.
Construction was funded by a donation of £100,000 made in 1922 by the Trustees set up in the will of Sir William Dunn who died in 1912. In today’s money this equates to £10.5m, a figure that demonstrates how building costs today have risen well above inflation.
The first Department of Pathology was opened in 1901 and ran until 1927 when it was handed over to Pharmacology on completion of the new purpose-built Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in South Parks Road.