Simon Heffer Hinterland

Few cities command one’s attention like Oxford, whose architectural masterpieces glow like honey

Outside London, few British towns can match Oxford for the richness of its architecture: Cambridge perhaps, though it pains this Cambridge man to admit Oxford might just have the edge. Its treasures are described in the revised Pevsner architectural guide The Buildings of England – Oxfordshire: Oxford and the South-East (Yale, £45).

The city was fortunate in its local stone, which glows like honey in the summer sunshine. But in modern times Oxford has suffered from some truly horrible building. The new volume is uncritical of the remarkably ugly Wolfson College, completed in 1974. The revised guides have been scrupulous in re-evaluating the opinions of the series’ progenitor Nikolaus Pevsner, who was unduly favourable to modernist horrors. A little more stringency would have been welcome here.

Yet in the past 25 years, Oxford has become home to some striking buildings. The Saïd Business School, designed by Dixon Jones, completed in 2001 and built in yellow brick, has a restraint that prompts the guide to say the building “belongs with the Postmodern return to evocative primal forms”. Even more impressive is the Blavatnik School of Government, completed in 2015, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and looking like a casual pile of different shapes.

In the seven centuries before the Second World War, Oxford became a showcase of the finest architecture. Charles Barry’s Tudor Gothic style can be seen in the New Buildings (1841-42) at University College. William Butterfield designed Keble College, which was largely built by 1870. In the first edition of this guide Pevsner described it as “actively ugly”. Happily, the revised volume observes that “for many, Keble will always represent Victorian Oxford at its most courageous and inspired”. From the 20th century, Reginald Blomfield and Giles Gilbert Scott left their mark on Lady Margaret Hall, the former designing much of the red-brick front quad in the 1910s, the latter the college chapel in the 1930s, which the guide calls “ambitious” in its Byzantine style.

But to most people Oxford means its ancient and Baroque buildings. Christ Church cathedral is a magnificent example of 12thcentury building, with its ornate vaulted ceiling dating to the 1400s. Mob Quad at Merton dates from the late 1200s, and survives as the oldest quad in the university. Magdalen College’s 15th-century Cloister Quad is a glorious exhibition of the local stone. And the great architects of the 17th and 18th century are mostly represented: Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (1664-1669) was only his second attempt at architecture, and one of his most celebrated.

Hawksmoor proliferated in the city in the early 18th century, his Clarendon Building originally housing the University Press. He conceived the idea for the Radcliffe Camera, begun by James Gibbs in 1737 and which the guide justifiably describes as his “masterpiece”.

But Oxford is filled with masterpieces, which is why walking its streets, preferably with this book in hand, is an inexhaustible delight.

g Dreaming spires: JMW Turner’s View of the High Street, Oxford, 1810