The favoured place for Victorian development lay north of Tree Lane where, after inclosure, plots could be taken on long leases that made building worth while. Most land in Iffley belonged to the Donnington Hospital (see 16) which was anxious, after about 1840, for tenants who would build valuable property.

P) The Priory was built c1840, in fashionable Gothic including battlements. From 1859-63 it housed a community of Ursuline nuns who had a small school, but its main tenant was Alfred Kent, a retired merchant. Alfred Wickson, one of the residents of Stone Cottages (see 14) worked for the Kents as gardener and coachman and inherited £1,000 when Mrs Kent died in 1900. He bought property in Cowley and never looked back.

The right-hand Priory gate post has a cross cut into the stone near its base; it does not look like a professional carving, as might have been done for the Ursulines. Edward Cordrey, in "Bygone Days in Iffley", says it commemorates a passer-by thrown from his horse and killed. "It was also the custom to cut out crosses in the turf, where anyone had lost or taken their life. This I have seen in Meadow Lane, when it was all grass, and a man had been found shot dead."

The Elms, now Hawkwell House Hotel,
facing Church Way

Hawkwell, now also Hawkwell House Hotel,
backing onto Tree Lane, behind The Elms

D) Denton House, W) Wootten and B) Beechwood all date from the earliest period of "gentrification" in Iffley, the 1790s. Businessmen doing well in Oxford liked the rising ground above Iffley Turn – healthy and pleasant, conveniently placed for the Turnpike into the city and offering plots large enough for impressive houses. They took long leases from Donnington, the landowners (see 16).

Denton House has spent most of its life in institutional use. It was altered, enlarged and uglified until its form was completely disguised. Recent development removed all the rubbish in an attempt to rescue the original house. What stands now is perhaps similar to what was built, but it has been converted into flats and closely surrounded by small houses. Denton was built for the Lock family, Oxford goldsmiths and pillars of city life, but before long it had become a boys' preparatory school run by the Revd Mr Slatter. Charles Reade the novelist went there in 1822, when he was eight, and suffered Slatter's discipline for five years.