Nuffield College was founded in 1937 after a donation to the University of Oxford by
Lord Nuffield, the industrialist and founder of
Morris Motors. On 16 November 1937, the
University entered a Deed of Covenant and Trust with Lord Nuffield. He donated land for the college on
New Road, to the west of the city centre near the mound of
Oxford Castle, on the site of the largely disused basin of the
Oxford Canal. As well as the land, Nuffield gave £900,000 to build the college and to provide it with an endowment. For the creation of Nuffield College and for his other donations he was described in 1949 by an editorial in
The Times as "the greatest benefactor of the University since the Middle Ages". From its inception, Nuffield College initiated a number of trends at both Oxford and Cambridge. Nuffield appointed its first fellows in 1939, a group that notably included the historian
Margery Perham, but the outbreak of
World War II meant that the college's construction did not begin until 1949. During the War, Nuffield hosted the Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey, which examined issues related to post-War reconstruction. Nuffield admitted its first students in 1945, and received its
Royal Charter from the hands of the
Duke of Edinburgh on 6 June 1958. Such was the perceived intimacy between College and government that decades later, writer
Christopher Hitchens could recall the "fast set that revolved between Nuffield and
Whitehall". ==Buildings==