Compared with Iffley Village, Rose Hill looks modern. In fact, there is evidence of people living here during Roman times (about the year 100 AD), before Iffley Village was inhabited. When developers were building Annesley Road in 1935 they found, in the gardens of numbers 29 and 31, pottery fragments that are now in the Ashmolean Museum. It seems likely that potters were based here to be near the Roman road which passed nearby on its way northwards from Dorchester. The potters seem to have remained active until the fifth century.

Rose Hill remained a windswept, rural spot covered by fields for the next 16 centuries. Outside No 37 Rose Hill is a turnpike milestone marking 56 miles from London; a little further down the hill, on the opposite side of the road, is another stone that says: ‘ere - Ifily Hy Way 1635’.

The area was not even named until the nineteenth century, when there were just a few dozen buildings, mostly clustered around the path that led from Iffley via Tree Lane to Cowley. Legend has it that an eccentric physician and apothecary, Dr John Ireland, named his house ‘Rose Hill’ in about 1800. He was the last man in the area to wear a pigtail and ruffles at his wrists. He died in 1830. His house has vanished without trace.

The Methodist chapel was built in 1835 by Henry Leake, at his own expense, reputedly because Iffley Church was unwilling at the time to bury Methodists. A day school for boys was built alongside it and subsequently demolished in the 1930s when the road was widened.

Another older building, ‘Cingal Tree House’, was named after the huge single tree that once stood at the top of the hill. This was eventually felled by the road widening, too. The large house was leased in 1934 by Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford), who was Labour councillor for Cowley and Iffley ward between 1937 and 1940. He renamed the house ‘Singletree’. During the Second World War it was used for evacuees, including a group of blind people from the East End of London. In 1944 it became a school, in the 1950s the Catering Department of the Oxford College of Technology, then an educational resource centre and finally part of the complex of sheltered housing that occupies the site today.

At the top of Rose Hill post-horses used to be rested and changed. An isolated inn called The King of Prussia was established there in the eighteenth century. The King of Prussia was an ally of Britain during the Seven Years War, and thought to be very popular as a result. A Victorian replacement was built in 1879 (on the site now occupied by the Co-op and Humphris garage). However, with the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in 1914, the old inn sign – which still carried a portrait of the King of Prussia – was torn down by soldiers. The pub was renamed The Allied Arms. The sign now depicted allied British, French and Belgian soldiers. In 1935 a new pub was built on the present site. The sign changed again after the end of the Second World War to show Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. In the 1970s they were replaced by a golfer, a cricketer and a rower linking arms. The pub went through further transformations until, after reverting to The King of Prussia, it closed suddenly in the spring of 2005.

In 1883 the Cemetery Committee of the local Board bought 26 acres of land from Christ Church. After a series of disputes over money, Rose Hill cemetery finally opened in 1894. Construction of a new road, which gave better access to the cemetery via Henley Avenue, was designed to provide work for unemployed people. It opened in 1923.

Among almost 20,000 graves in the cemetery today is that of Ted Brooks, thought to be the only Oxford resident ever to receive a Victoria Cross, awarded during the First World War. In 1923 the War Memorial, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, was erected. It commemorates 5,878 members of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Infantry who were killed in the First World War; 1,408 people killed in the Second World War are commemorated on its rear slope.

In 1930 the City Council finally named the road Rose Hill and then widened it. The area was being transformed by the opening of the motor works in Cowley. Relatively well-paid factory jobs attracted people from far and wide, particularly the coal mines in Wales, where jobs were being lost.

Work on the northern part of the ‘Rose Hill Estate’ (then known as ‘Iffley Turn’ or ‘Iffley Borders’) began in 1926 and continued until 1939. In 1933 the City Council bought a large plot of land. By the beginning of the Second World War some 2,000 homes had been completed. As was the custom at the time, streets were named after local dignitaries; Ellesmere, Egerton and Annesley Roads were all named after former ‘High Stewards’ of Oxford. In 1947 work began on a southern extension between Iffley and the river, including ‘prefabs’ (which no longer exist) and the Orlit houses, which are currently being replaced.

The new estate was a pioneer in at least two respects. The Community Centre was founded in 1937 and occupied a wooden building until it was burned down in mysterious circumstances in 1955. It was then rebuilt on its current site at the Oval. This was one of the first, and most successful, of such centres in Oxfordshire and indeed the country. The range and vitality of its activities, chronicled in The Rose Hill Roundabout, surprised even some of its founders.

When Rose Hill School opened in 1952 it was regarded as something of a showpiece. Visitors came from around the world to admire the spacious, light buildings. By 1955 some 355 children had enrolled. Some - together with their teachers – transferred from Iffley and Singletree.

For many years Rose Hill led a schizophrenic official existence. After the City Council extended its limits in 1928, the northern half fell within Iffley, the southern half in Littlemore. Only in 1992 was Littlemore absorbed by the City of Oxford and the two halves united in a single Council.

Sources:

Patrick Reynolds, A Stroll Through Old Iffley, The Baldun Press, Iffley, 1991

Susanne Shatford and Trevor Williams, The Changing Face of St Clements and East Oxford, Robert Boyd, 1997.

Ann Spolls ? check Symonds, The Changing Face of Rose Hill, Robert Boyd, 2000.

Iffley Local History Society www.iffleyhistory.org.uk