After the
Second World War, the number of graduates of other universities who went to Cambridge to do research increased significantly. The university therefore decided to found
University College in 1965 to help accommodate these students. The college was based at Bredon House, a property built in the early twentieth century by
John Stanley Gardiner, who was a Professor of
Zoology at the university from 1909 to 1937. He donated the house, with its long narrow garden running from
Barton Road to Selwyn Gardens, to the university upon his death in 1946. The college then purchased further property on its eastern boundary. University College was opened on 30 June 1965 as a college for postgraduate students, with the classicist
John Sinclair Morrison as its first President. At the time, all the undergraduate colleges of the university were single-sex institutions and University College was the first in the university to admit men and women as both students and Fellows. The college, from its outset, set out to be a cosmopolitan and egalitarian institution with distinct differences from the older, more traditional Cambridge colleges, with no
Senior Combination Room, no "High Table" reserved for Fellows at formal dinners in the college and no portraits hung in the Dining Hall. The college's founding deed required the college to either find an endowment within 10 years or face dissolution. In 1972, the Wolfson Foundation agreed to provide a capital endowment and help to fund the construction of central buildings around Bredon House and the college's East and West Courts. In recognition of this, the college was renamed
Wolfson College on 1 January 1973. The new buildings (designed by the architect
Michael Mennim) were opened by
Queen Elizabeth II and the
Duke of Edinburgh in 1977. Though most of the college's buildings are modern, the design of the campus is similar to that of the university's older colleges, with buildings grouped around two main courts. The floor of the entrance hall to the main building is made of thin slices of granite taken from the old
London Bridge (the main section of which was taken to
Arizona to be rebuilt in the late 1960s). Further building and acquisition of neighbouring properties has continued. In the 1980s, the college purchased the house and garden owned by Sir
Vivian Fuchs on the western side on the college. Plommer House on the northern side of the college was also left to the college in his will by Hugh Plommer, a founding Fellow of the college. The acquisition of property has allowed for the building of a number of new facilities, mainly funded by donations from philanthropic foundations and individuals. Other major benefactions have come from the
Fairleigh Dickinson Foundation and the Toda Foundation. In the 1990s, with the help of the
Gatsby Foundation, the college purchased the "western field" on which was built the Chancellor's Centre and further residential blocks. == Buildings and grounds ==