Oxford as it stood in 1770, drawn after the real place and simplified: the colleges round their quadrangles, the University’s Schools, theatre and library, the city churches and the High, between the Thames and the Cherwell; every building here stood in that year, and none of the Victorian ones.
A college of Oxford is a quadrangle. From Merton’s Mob Quad of the thirteenth century and William of Wykeham’s New College of 1379–86 the founders built their colleges as ranges of chambers round a court, reached by staircases from the court, with the gate tower, the chapel, the hall and the library set into the ranges, and the plan held for four hundred years. The colleges went on building it in the late Gothic manner long after it had been given up elsewhere: Wadham (1610–13), Oriel (1620–42) and University College (1634–77) are Gothic still, and the Schools Quadrangle of 1613–24 sets the five orders one above another on a Gothic gate tower.
Then the classical arrived. Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (1664–69) took its plan from Serlio’s Theatre of Marcellus; Aldrich’s Peckwater (1707–14) is Palladian; Hawksmoor gave the University the Clarendon Building and Queen’s its screen and cupola, and built All Souls a Gothic of his own to match the old college; Gibbs’s Radcliffe Camera (1737–49) was set free in a square cleared for it. Beside them stood the city: the High curving from Carfax to Magdalen Bridge, the churches and their towers, Cornmarket running north to the gate, and the houses of the streets, timber-framed or refronted with sashes.
The year is 1770 because it is the last before the town was improved. The Mileways Act of 1771 pulled down the North Gate with its prison, the Bocardo, and the East Gate, and moved the markets off the streets into the Covered Market (1774); Magdalen Bridge was rebuilt from 1772, the Radcliffe Observatory begun the same year, Canterbury Quad in 1773, and the Carfax Conduit carried away in 1787. The great buildings of the eighteenth century were finished, Balliol’s Fisher Building only in 1769; none of the Victorian rebuilding, Keble, the Museum or the railway had come.
The plan follows the positions of the real buildings and the old plans of the city, but simplified: each college is drawn as its chief quadrangles, the gardens and the lesser buildings are left out or reduced, and the houses are placed along the streets by type. Click a building for its name, its date and the rule it shows.