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St Aldate's, Oxford

Christ Church, OxfordStreets in OxfordUse British English from December 2017
Oxford Town Hall 1
Oxford Town Hall 1

St Aldate's () is a street in central Oxford, England, named after Saint Aldate, but formerly known as Fish Street.The street runs south from the generally acknowledged centre of Oxford at Carfax. The Town Hall, which includes the Museum of Oxford, is on the east side of the street. Christ Church, with its imposing Tom Tower, faces the east end of St Aldate's, while Pembroke College (on Pembroke Square) faces its west end. Other adjoining streets include Blue Boar Street to the east side and Pembroke Street, Pembroke Square, Brewer Street, Rose Place, and Speedwell Street to the west. St Aldate's Church is on the west side of the street, in Pembroke Square. Opposite Christ Church is Alice's Shop, formerly frequented by Alice Liddell, and the model for the Sheep Shop in the "Wool and Water" chapter in Through the Looking-Glass. South of Christ Church is an entrance to Christ Church Meadow and, still on the east side, the University of Oxford's Faculty of Music, containing the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments; the building was opened in 1936 for St Catherine's Society. Oxford's police station (designed by H. F. Hurcombe, the City Estates Surveyor, and completed in 1936) and the Oxford Combined Court Centre (designed by Henry Smith and completed in 1932) opposite precede a junction with Thames Street to the west. The police station was featured in the Inspector Morse television series. After Folly Bridge over the River Thames or Isis, St Aldate's enters Grandpont and becomes Abingdon Road (A4144), leading directly south out of the city of Oxford towards the Oxford Ring Road and the villages of Kennington & Radley and the town of Abingdon.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article St Aldate's, Oxford (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

St Aldate's, Oxford
Beef Lane, Oxford City Centre

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Wikipedia: St Aldate's, OxfordContinue reading on Wikipedia

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Latitude Longitude
N 51.75 ° E -1.2569444444444 °
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Pembroke College

Beef Lane
OX1 1DW Oxford, City Centre
England, United Kingdom
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Oxford Town Hall 1
Oxford Town Hall 1
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Tom Tower
Tom Tower

Tom Tower is a bell tower in Oxford, England, named after its bell, Great Tom. It is over Tom Gate, on St Aldates, the main entrance of Christ Church, Oxford, which leads into Tom Quad. This square tower with an octagonal lantern and facetted ogee dome was designed by Christopher Wren and built 1681–82. The strength of Oxford architectural tradition and Christ Church's connection to its founder, Henry VIII, motivated the decision to complete the gatehouse structure, left unfinished by Cardinal Wolsey at the date of his fall from power in 1529, and which had remained roofless since. Wren made a case for working in a Late Gothic style—that it "ought to be Gothick to agree with the Founders worke"—a style that had not been seen in a prominent building for a hundred and fifty years, making Tom Tower a lonely precursor of the Gothic Revival that got underway in the mid-18th century. Wren never came to supervise the structure as it was being erected by the stonemason he had recommended, Christopher Kempster of Burford. In 1732–34, when William Kent was called upon to make sympathetic reconstruction of the east range of Clock Court in Wolsey's Tudor Hampton Court Palace, he naturally turned to the precedent of Tom Tower for his "central ogee dome with its coronet of pilaster-like gothick finials". The tower of Dunster House at Harvard University is a direct imitation of Tom Tower, though its details have been Georgianised, and stones from Christ Church are installed in one of the house's main entryways. Tom Tower was the inspiration for the Clock Tower (formally the Old Arts Building) at the University of Auckland.

Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church, Oxford

Christ Church (Latin: Ædes Christi, the temple or house, ædēs, of Christ, and thus sometimes known as "The House") is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, the college is uniquely a joint foundation of the university and the cathedral of the Oxford diocese, Christ Church Cathedral, which also serves as the college chapel and whose dean is ex officio the college head. As of 2022, Christ Church had the largest financial endowment of any Oxford college at £770 million. As of 2022, the college had 661 students. Its grounds contain a number of architecturally significant buildings including Tom Tower (designed by Sir Christopher Wren), Tom Quad (the largest quadrangle in Oxford), and the Great Dining Hall, which was the seat of the parliament assembled by King Charles I during the English Civil War. The buildings have inspired replicas throughout the world in addition to being featured in films such as Harry Potter and The Golden Compass, helping Christ Church become the most popular Oxford college for tourists with almost half a million visitors annually. The college's alumni include 13 British prime ministers out of the 30 educated at Oxford (the highest number of any college at Oxford or Cambridge), as well as former prime ministers of Pakistan and Ceylon. Other notable alumni include King Edward VII, King William II of the Netherlands, the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, seventeen archbishops, writers Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland) and W. H. Auden, philosopher John Locke, and scientist Robert Hooke. Albert Einstein was also associated with the college. The college has several cities and places named after it.