England Guide
Oxfordshire, the Chilterns and the Cotswolds
Christ Church College
Opening time: Mon– Sat 9.30am–5.30pm, Sun 1–5.30pm; Picture Gallery: May– Sept Mon– Sat 10.30am–5pm, Sun 2–5pm; Oct– April Mon– Sat 10.30am–1pm & 2–4.30pm
Price: £5; Picture Gallery £2
Address: The visitors' entrance is off Christ Church Meadow
Telephone: 01865/286 573
Website: www.chch.ox.ac.uk
Albert Einstein, William Gladstone and no fewer than twelve other British prime ministers were educated at Christ Church, Oxford's largest and arguably most prestigious college. Its striking Tom Quad is the biggest quad in Oxford, so large in fact that the Royalists penned up their mobile larder of cattle here during the Civil War. Guarded by the Tom Tower, which was added by Christopher Wren in 1681 to house the weighty "Great Tom" bell, the Quad's soft, honey-coloured stone makes a harmonious whole, but it was actually built in two main phases with the southern side dating back to Wolsey, the north finally finished in the 1660s. A wide stone staircase in the southeast corner of the Quad leads up to the Dining Hall, the grandest refectory in Oxford with a fanciful hammer-beam roof and a set of stern portraits of past scholars by a roll call of well-known artists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough and Millais.
Just to the rear of the Tom Quad stands the Cathedral, which is also the college chapel. The Anglo-Saxons built a church on this site in the seventh century as part of St Frideswide Priory. The priory was suppressed in 1524, but the church survived, becoming a cathedral forty years later. It's an unusually discordant church, with all sorts of bits and bobs from different periods, but it's fascinating all the same. The dominant features are the sturdy circular columns and rounded arches of the Normans, but there are also early Gothic pointed arches and the chancel ceiling is a particularly fine example of fifteenth-century stone vaulting.
A passage leads through to the Peckwater Quad, whose pleasantries are overwhelmed by the whopping Neoclassical library. Nearby, the pocket-sized Canterbury Quad houses the Picture Gallery, which displays fine works by artists from Italy and the Netherlands, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, van Dyck and Frans Hals.