Oxford is famous for being home to some of the smartest people on Earth, but not all of those clever clogses work at the ancient university. There are several other foundations and institutes based there, and one of them – the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) – is getting a brand new campus on the outskirts of the city. It will come complete with its very own train station, which is part of a new government-backed project to reopen a disused railway line.
Littlemore station will form part of a wider project to bring back the Cowley branch, a suburban line in south-east Oxford which would link several local communities with the city centre, and with London. Only Littlemore station will be designed by Foster + Partners, the architects creating the new EIT campus.
The EIT is a research institute with a goal to ‘[translate] scientific discovery into real world impact’ by ‘combining cutting-edge research and commercial capability’. In simple terms, it's full of a lot of very brainy people who are working to create tech for the healthcare, farming, energy, and AI industries which are profitable for businesses and good for humanity. It’s funded by Larry Ellison, an American tech giant who is currently the second richest man on Earth.
An organisation with ambitions that lofty is deserving of an equally inspiring base, which is why the EIT has teamed up with world-famous architects Foster + Partners to design its brand new Oxford campus.
For the uninitiated, Foster + Partners is like the Beyoncé of architecture: everyone knows the name, and even those not invested in the industry know the greatest hits. For Foster + Partners, those hits include things like Wembley Stadium, Millennium Bridge, and the Gherkin.
The new EIT campus, based in the Oxford Science Park in the suburb of Littlemore, will be kitted out with ‘more than 300,000 sq ft of research laboratories, educational and gathering spaces’. It’ll share the park with several other organisations, as well as a state-of-the-art cancer research clinic, also funded by Ellison.
The development could generate nearly 7,000 jobs, and will come with an entire new train station in Littlemore. This will form part of the potential reopening of the Cowley branch, which was recently announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves – you can read more about that here.
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