St Mary's University, Twickenham is a public university in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, in South West London committed to the mission of the Catholic Church in higher education. Originally founded in 1850 as a college for training Catholic schoolmasters, it became a constituent college of the University of London Institute of Education in 1949. This affiliation ended in 1976, and its degree courses were then validated by the University of Surrey. Formerly called St Mary's University College, it was granted full university title by the Privy Council on 23 January 2014. Since July 2019, the university has hosted the Mater Ecclesiae College, whose Ecclesiastical faculties enshrined since 2013 in the "Bellarmine Institute" was brought in after the closure of Heythrop College, University of London earlier in 2019. History Strawberry Hill House and the Chapel in the Wood The university is built on land previously attached to Strawberry Hill House, which was originally a small cottage in two or of land by the River Thames. Horace Walpole, a son of the politician Robert Walpole, rented the cottage in 1747 and subsequently bought it. He set about reconstructing the house and adding to the land, which now amounts to approximately . Walpole did not follow the conventional 18th-century fashion of classical building, but sought his inspiration from medieval styles, creating a notable early example of neo-Gothic architecture. Some of his contemporaries imitated his design; this house and the idea it embodied take their place in the history of architecture as "Strawberry Hill Gothic" . By the end of the 20th century, Strawberry Hill House had fallen into a state of disrepair, with the cost of reversing its condition too substantial for the college to meet. The Grade One listed building had been registered as a building at risk by English Heritage (now Historic England) in 1996, and in August 2002, the Strawberry Hill Trust was formed with a mission to restore the building and open it to the wider public. After the building was included in the 2004 World Monuments Fund Watch list of the world's 100 Most Endangered Sites and featured on the BBC Two programme Restoration, the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded the Strawberry Hill Trust a £4.6 million grant in 2005. £370,000 in development funding and a £1.4 million investment from St Mary's were also received, but finances still fell short of the projected £8.2 million cost of restoration. The shortfall