Exeter College Library, Oxford

As with much of his other work, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s commission to enlarge Exeter College, Oxford, stemmed from new legislation and this work established him as an architect for the universities that he had not been given the chance to enter as a student. But he only mentions Exeter College in his Recollections as among his ‘Works to be noted since 1845’, and the Rector’s House, along with other secular buildings, further on. Scott’s coyness over Exeter College, as elsewhere in the Recollections, was probably because of family involvement. When he was writing his Recollections early in 1864, his third son, Albert Henry (1844-65), had just left home to study at Exeter College. Whether Albert had obtained his place through his father’s connections with the college authorities cannot be ascertained, but Scott obviously knew the Rector, Dr. John Lightfoot (1803-87), and Albert was the first Scott to go to Oxford rather than Cambridge.

In 1856, as his chapel was rising nearby, Scott rebuilt the college library on the site which had earlier been proposed for the chapel, between the quadrangle and the Bodleian Library. It is a two-storey building with a turret staircase in the angle between it and a single-storey wing running parallel to the end of the Bodleian. This is an attractive-looking building that fits well into the college garden between the rear of the old quadrangle and the great mass of the Bodleian Library. In 1857 Scott built the new house for the Rector, Dr. Lightfoot, facing the eastern end of his chapel. Lightfoot had been the Rector since 1854 and presided over the whole building programme. His entire adult life was centred on the college, having been a student there, and he eventually died, some thirty years later, while still occupying the house that Scott had built for him, which is the least successful of Scott’s five buildings at Exeter College. In the summer of 1858 work started on Scott’s last building at Exeter. This was an extension from the rear of the Broad Street range towards the chapel. It was demolished in 1964, when new student rooms were built to the west and the quadrangle was enlarged to provide access to them. The loss of one of Scott’s minor works is more than compensated by a new view of one of his best buildings.

Bibliography

Scott’s Recollections, II 81, 273.
Pevsner, N. and Sherwood, J., Oxfordshire, Buildings of England (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 136-7, 161, 337.
Morris, J., The Oxford Book of Oxford (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978), p. 245.
Victoria County History, Oxfordshire, vol. III, p. 118.
The Builder, 2 July 1859, p. 440.
Jackson, Sir T. G., Bt. R. A., Recollections, The Life and Travels of a Victorian Architect (Unicorn Press, London, 2003), p. 51.
Boase, F., Modern English Biography (Frank Cass, London, 1965), vol. 6.