Estate from the centre of the city occurred over time. The first new building erected on the Streatham Estate was the Washington Singer building; the foundation stone was laid by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII), then President of the University College of the South West of England. The building was opened in 1931. The first of the purpose-built halls of residence, Mardon Hall, opened in 1933. The second academic building on the estate was the Roborough Library named in recognition of the interest taken in the development of the college by the first Lord Roborough, one of its early benefactors. Roborough Library was completed around 1939.
The University College of the South West of England became the University of Exeter and received its royal charter in 1955, exactly one hundred years after the formation of the original Exeter School of Art. Queen Elizabeth II presented the charter to the university on a visit to Streatham the following year.
The university underwent a period of considerable expansion in the 1960s. Between 1963 and 1968, a period when the number of students at Exeter almost doubled, no fewer than ten major buildings were completed on the Streatham estate as well as halls of residence for around 1,000 students. These included homes for the Chemistry and Physics departments, the Newman, Laver and Engineering Buildings and Streatham Court. Queen's Building had been opened for the Arts Faculty in 1959 and the Amory Building, housing Law and Social Sciences, followed in 1974. In the following two decades, considerable investment was made in developing new self-catering accommodation for students.
Gifts from the Gulf States made it possible to build a new university library in 1983 and more recently have allowed for the creation of a new Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies; as of 2017, Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates– had given more than £8 million to Exeter University, and was described by the university as its "single most important …
