The Making of the Radcliffe Observatory’, the Georgian Group Journal, Vol
Geoffrey Tyack, ‘The making of the Radcliffe Observatory’, The Georgian Group Journal, Vol. x, 2000, pp. 122–140
text © the authors 2000 THE MAKING OF THE RADCLIFFE OBSERVATORY
GEOFFREY TYACK
he Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford has long maker, presented what is reckoned to be the first Tbeen recognised as an important monument telescope to the States General of Holland in , of early neo-classical architecture. But, for all its and in an observatory was built on the roof of historical interest, its striking appearance and its the University of Leiden, followed by others at excellent state of preservation, it remains surprisingly Utrecht and elsewhere, including one built by King little known, even to architectural historians . This is Christian IV of Denmark in in the form of a - partly because of its location, outside the centre of the ft-high tower next to the church of Holy Trinity, city, squashed up against the dreary th-century Copenhagen . The first tower observatories were not wards of a hospital, and only accessible through the very sophisticated buildings, but in Claude grounds of one of the lesser-known colleges of Oxford Perrault, himself a scientist, built a more elaborate University. It is also perhaps because of its unusual observatory at Paris which still survives in an altered functions and complicated building history, both of form; it was a two-storeyed structure with a flat roof, which repay investigation. projections at the corners for the telescopes, a room According to Anthony Wood the first observatory for larger astronomical instruments, and a meeting in Oxford was the ancient medieval gatehouse known room for the members of Colbert’s recently-established as Friar Bacon’s Study, guarding the southern approach Académie des Sciences. Then in the Royal to the city at Folly Bridge; here, according to legend, Observatory was built at Greenwich to the designs of the Friar ‘did sometimes use the night season to ascend Christopher Wren, who held the Savilian chair in this place ... and there to take the altitude and distance Oxford from to . It contained an octagonal of the stars’ . But the recorded, as opposed to the observing room for movable telescopes, rooms on mythical, history of observatories in Oxford begins either side for the fixed instruments, and lodgings for with the foundation of the Savilian Professorship of the Astronomer Royal, who needed to be on hand in Astronomy in . No purpose-built observatory was order to make night-time observations; the longer supplied by the University, but the first Professor, John telescopes, including one of ft, were mounted on Bainbridge, was allowed to use the top room of the poles in the garden. gate tower of the newly-erected Schools Quadrangle, There is no indication that Wren ever intended completed structurally in the very year of the foundation an observatory of this kind for Oxford, and, in a letter of the professorship, and Bainbridge’s successor John to John Fell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, on Greaves kept a collection of telescopes and other December , he said that an adequate observatory instruments there. could be placed ‘as well in a garden as a tower’ and The creation of the professorship came just need consist of no more than a ‘little house of boards’ before the first observatories designed for telescopes ft square and ft high with a detachable roof ; it were erected. Hans Lippersky of Middelburg, a lens- could house a telescope, a mural quadrant and a
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‘quadrant to take distances’. Such a utilitarian Paris observatory, on an east-west axis. And, since structure was in fact built in by the then Savilian some of the instruments rotated on an arc of Professor, Edward Halley, on the roof of his official degrees, there had to be shutter openings in the walls residence in New College Lane, where it can still be and roof. Hornsby also requested a ‘large room for seen . It was presumably adequate for observations experimental philosophy’, which he suggested might made through smaller telescopes, but James Bradley, be placed over his new official residence; above it who succeeded Halley in , complained that there there would be another room of the same size for were not enough instruments in Oxford to enable ‘occasional observations in any part of the Heavens’, him to carry out his research properly, or a building housing the movable refracting telescopes used for capable of housing his own instruments, which such observations . This implied the building of a included a -ft telescope . His successor, Thomas three-storeyed tower observatory, perhaps not unlike Hornsby, solved the problem temporarily by creating that built at Berlin in – , as well as a lower an observatory of his own at Corpus Christi College, adjacent building for the large instruments. The total but this was clearly no more than a stop-gap solution, cost, including the ground and the instruments was and in he petitioned the Radcliffe Trustees for estimated by Hornsby at £ , or £ , , a sum money to build a proper observatory out of the which was to be greatly exceeded. interest on the property left to Oxford University in The first step towards the construction of the by the physician John Radcliffe . This gift ‒ one new observatory took place in , when the Trustees of the most generous in Oxford’s history ‒ had already resolved to ask the Lord Chancellor for permission enabled the construction of James Gibbs’s Radcliffe to use the Radcliffe funds to buy ‘a piece of ground Library (now known as the Radcliffe Camera) and, and to erect thereon a large Observatory Room for more recently, the Radcliffe Infirmary, a more the use of the Savilian Professor of Astronomy to pedestrian building of – by Stiff Leadbetter . read courses of lectures; and to purchase such It now enabled the University to erect, at no cost to mathematical instruments as are proper to be used itself, the finest of all eighteenth-century observatories. there’ . The ground was to the north of the city’s In his initial letter to the Radcliffe Trustees, built-up area, alongside the road to Woodstock and Hornsby set out his requirements for the building . beyond the Infirmary (Fig. ); it had been leased There should first of all be a building at ground level from St John’s College in by the th Duke of for the larger instruments which, in his own words, Marlborough, an enthusiast for astronomy . ‘must be placed on the ground and fixed to the plane Permission was granted, and designs procured from of the meridian’; they comprised quadrants, a zenith Henry Keene, an architect much favoured by Oxford sector (a long telescope fixed to a wall and pointing University in the previous decade, with work at Christ out of a roof) and a transit instrument (a revolving Church, University College and Balliol College to his telescope), all of which were needed to measure the credit . The Professor’s official lodgings were now position and movements of the heavenly bodies ‒ to be placed in a separate house away from the main seen then as a prime task of astronomy, not least for structure, which would be devoted entirely to scientific its value in assisting navigation. The instruments had research and teaching, and the cost was estimated to be fixed to piers firmly embedded into the ground upwards to £ , , including the astronomical in order to minimise movement, and they had to be instruments, which were, in the event, paid for out of aligned with the meridian so as to supply a fixed line a windfall from the Clarendon Press . Keene met the from which observations could begin. So the building Radcliffe Trustees on January and showed had to be a single-storeyed structure aligned, like the them his designs, which do not appear to have
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Fig. . The site of the Observatory. Ordnance Survey .
Fig. . The Observatory from the south-east, from R. Ackermann, History of the University of Oxford, . Green College, Oxford.
THE GEORGIAN GROUP JOURNAL VOLUME X THE MAKING OF THE RADCLIFFE OBSERVATORY survived, on March; the foundation stone was laid where no-one could see it, and urging that the new in June of the same year . building should ‘reflect grandeur and magnificence Keene’s appointment may have come about in Oxford’ . through the influence of the rd Earl of Lichfield, Wyatt’s architecture certainly had the merit of chairman of the Radcliffe Trustees and Chancellor of boldness and novelty after the tame neo-Palladianism the University, and it was Keene who designed Lord of buildings like the nearby Infirmary. Both the Lichfield’s impressive monument in Spelsbury church, Pantheon assembly room in Oxford Street, London near his country seat at Ditchley (Oxfordshire). When ( ) and Heaton Hall near Manchester, begun at Lichfield died on September he was replaced, about the same time, showed that he was capable of both as chairman of the Trustees and Chancellor of reinterpreting the classical language of architecture the University, by another Oxfordshire nobleman, and ornament in an engaging and original way, making Lord North, of Wroxton Abbey, M.P. for Banbury him a credible rival to the older and better-established and Prime Minister since , and in March Adam brothers, who built nothing in either of the two the trustees were shown another elevation for the ancient English universities. Like the Adams, Wyatt Observatory, which they approved. Keene was then was adept at displacing established architects, and in ordered to give an account of the work already done Oxford the victim was Keene, whom he superseded and told not to proceed further, though he carried on not only at the Observatory but also at Christ Church, as builder when work resumed . The second where he built the new Canterbury Quadrangle in elevation must have been by James Wyatt, who was –, and later, after Keene’s death, at Worcester paid £ by the Trustees in , and when Keene College . With the assistance of the builder and died in his son Theodosius was told to finish carpenter James Pears, mayor of Oxford in , he the building under Wyatt’s direction . went on to dominate the architectural life of the city The reason for the change of architect is not for the rest of the eightenth century, designing the entirely clear. There may have been some lobbying library at Oriel College and engaging in numerous by Sir William Bagot of Blithfield (Staffordshire), one restorations of medieval buildings at New College, of the Trustees and the head of the family which had Magdalen College and elsewhere . But it was the financed Wyatt’s journey to Italy in the s . Observatory which made his reputation, and it is this There also seems to have been a feeling that Keene’s singular building which constitutes his most striking design was too plain for a major public building in and original architectural contribution to the city. (or on the edge of) a city of grandiose architectural Since we do not know what Keene’s original monuments. The architectural improvement of design looked like we can only infer how much of the Oxford was a subject of public interest in the s, present building (Fig. ) is his and how much Wyatt’s. after the recent passing of a Paving Act ( ) which The hipped-roofed parsonage-like Professor’s house, led to the demolition of the old east and north gates, into which Hornsby moved with his family in , the building of a new market, and of the new Magdalen could easily have been designed by any competent Bridge carrying the London road over the Cherwell, Georgian builder, and the same applies to the stable begun in . In his pamphlet Oxonia Explicata et block which is joined to it by an office wing and which Ornata ( ) Edward Tatham, Rector of Lincoln now forms part of the entrance quadrangle at Green College and one of the most vociferous of the local College, the occupant of the Observatory since cognoscenti , specifically criticised the original design . There is no reason to assume that Wyatt had for the observatory, calling it a ‘heavy, sluggish heap’, anything to do with these buildings, but the main complaining that it was to be placed in a situation observatory is more problematic. According to James
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Fig. . The Observatory under construction, from the south-east, by John Baptist Malchair, October . The Savilian Professor’s house is to the right. Ashmolean Museum.
Pears’s clerk, John Hudson, writing long after the astronomical instruments they were designed to event in , Wyatt ‘altered the plan and outside contain (Fig. ). The eastern building (the present finishing’ of the main building, leaving the remainder east wing) was linked by a semicircular corridor to to be ‘carried up by Mr Jas Pears under the direction the professor’s house and contained the most of Mr James Wyatt and roofed in ’ . This accoun t important instruments: a transit instrument; two seems to be broadly accurate, so long as we assume mural quadrants of -ft radius, one facing north and that the ‘main building’ referred to one of the single- the other south; and a -ft zenith sector, which was storeyed structures containing the astronomical placed in a central north-facing room which still instruments which were the raison d’etre of the whole retains its wooden gallery. The instruments were project. They were finished by the summer of , mounted on heavy stone piers embedded in concrete when the astronomical instruments were delivered by to minimise the danger of movement, and could the well-known London instrument-maker John project through slots in the walls and roof, which Bird, and they are shown with the scaffolding not yet could be closed with wooden shutters (Fig. ) . removed in a drawing of October (Fig. ) by the There was also a study for Hornsby. The west wing, local drawing-master John Baptist Malchair . externally identical, contained smaller instruments The layout of the two single-storeyed buildings brought to the new building by Hornsby from his old can only be understood with reference to the observatory at Corpus Christi College. There was
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Fig. . Plan of the central block showing the original uses of the rooms. Wilbur Wright.
Fig. . Interior of the east wing showing telescope and quadrant, c. . Bodleian Library, Oxford.
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Fig. . The east wing from the south. Geoffrey Tyack.
Fig. . The west wing from the north. The buttress-like projections indicate the placing of the slots in the walls. Geoffrey Tyack.
THE GEORGIAN GROUP JOURNAL VOLUME X THE MAKING OF THE RADCLIFFE OBSERVATORY also a detached circular building (since demolished) Building up to the Second Story’ . By then £ , to the south, containing an equatorial sector, which had already been spent out of the £ , originally could scan the heavens in all directions . estimated, and the Trustees resolved to keep future Each of the wings has its own entrance, set within costs down to an annual £ to £ , . A drawing a relieving arch, and each is starkly neo-classical in by Malchair, dated (Fig. ), shows the first floor appearance, with a flat, unencumbered roof-line and structurally complete and on November the no balustrade (Fig. ). This effect, anticipating locksmith Thomas Blockley was paid £ for locks . Soane’s stable block at Chelsea Hospital, was According to John Hudson, the second-floor tower dictated by the need to ensure that the scientific which crowned the composition was finished in instruments could project out through the slots in . There matters rested for another ten years. the walls and roof ‒ an interesting example of the £ , had been spent by ‒ over £ more ‘form follows function’ dictum; these slots can be than the total cost of the Radcliffe Infirmary ‒ but the clearly seen in early photographs of the south front, central block remained an empty shell without any of but they were smoothed over when the building was its proposed external sculpture until the end of the refaced in – (Fig. ). Ornament was kept to a decade. By , when work on the interiors and the minimum, apart from a guilloche moulding at cornice external embellishments finally came to an end, the level and Coade stone swags and paterae over the cost had risen to £ , , nearly three times what had windows: an early use of this material, which was been proposed in . only patented in . It remains an open question In his Cours d’Architecture ( ) the French whether Keene was involved in any way in the design architect and theorist J-F. Blondel wrote that an of the wings. He was still alive and actively engaged observatory should have a ‘decided character’ ( un on the building while they were being constructed, caractère décidé ) . Wyatt imparted this elusive quality but his other classical buildings in Oxford, like the by adopting a semicircular plan for the central block almost exactly contemporary Provost’s Lodgings and by his unconventional use of neo-classical motifs at Worcester College ( –), show none of the and methods of architectural composition. Viewed precocious interest in neo-classical form and from the south, the composition builds up in a jerky, decoration seen at the Observatory. It seems likely somewhat angular, fashion from the low one-storeyed therefore that the facades of the wings are essentially wings though the two-storeyed first floor of the Wyatt’s work. central portion to the octagonal tower at the centre: With the wings in use, and Hornsby comfortably an effect which is now best seen in old illustrations, ensconced in his new house, the Observatory was in since the southern part of the observatory garden has effect operational, and when the Danish astronomer been swamped by utilitarian hospital buildings. The Thomas Bugge visited Hornsby in he declared two lower floors of the south front, with the central that it was ‘the best in Europe, both as regards the bays canted forward, echo Sir William Chambers’s arrangement and the instruments’. But it took domestic-looking Observatory built for King George another years to complete the whole project. In III at Richmond in –, and their basic form, February the Trustees authorised payments of though not their detailing, may have been inherited £ for Headington stone and £ for Windrush from Keene (Fig. ) . But the north side (Fig. ) is stone (the latter used for the tower), and another of quite different, its bold semicircular shape echoing £ to John Bolton for plumber’s work . the Broad Street facade of Wren’s Sheldonian Construction of the central block was under way by Theatre and perhaps also James Gibbs’s Radcliffe May , when the Trustees resolved to ‘finish the Camera, where a semicircular spiral staircase is also
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Fig. . The Observatory from the west after the building of the first floor, by John Baptist Malchair, . Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
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Fig. . The lower floors of the central block from the south. Geoffrey Tyack.
Fig. . The central block from the north-east. Geoffrey Tyack.
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Fig. . The tower from the south. Geoffrey Tyack.
THE GEORGIAN GROUP JOURNAL VOLUME X THE MAKING OF THE RADCLIFFE OBSERVATORY concealed behind a curved facade. Any potential have seemed particularly surprising in a scientific heaviness is mitigated by the arrangement of paired building in Oxford, widely seen as a bastion of Ionic pilasters, niches and Coade stone panels at clerical obscurantism. The Tower of the Winds was, piano nobile level , embellishments which failed to however , a particularly appropriate model for an please the hypercritical Edward Tatham, who observatory. It was designed as a public building, complained in that in ‘this building, which is and stood in an important public space. It was large and bulky, we see the most trifling and delicate embellished externally with sculpture of great beauty architecture ... Did [Wyatt] expect to amuse the and sophistication, and there were sundials carved University of Oxford with his butter-prints and on the stonework outside. And the interior originally Italian baubles?’ housed a water-clock, from which movements of the In the design of the top floor, comprising the stars could be predicted . So Wyatt’s tower not only upper observatory (Fig. ), Wyatt showed himself to proclaimed Oxford’s conversion to the cause of be one of the most creative architects of his generation. Grecian architecture; it also made a statement about The Tower of the Winds in Athens, built c. BC, the building’s function. was described by Vitruvius , but the building itself The external sculpture, not carried out until the was little known to westerners until the publication s, is one of the few coherent neo-classical of Le Roy’s Les Ruines des Plus Beaux Monuments de programmes of sculptural embellishment in an English la Grèce in and the first volume of Stuart and public building of its date. The Tower of the Winds Revett’s Antiquities of Athens in . Originally in Athens has figures representing one of the Winds designed as a clock tower, after the Ottoman conquest (north, north-east, east, etc) carved on each of the it became, in Stuart’s words, ‘a Place of great Devotion eight sides below cornice level, each with its name in which, at stated times, certain Dervises [ sic ] perform and attributes. The Observatory tower was likewise the circular Mohammedan Dance’ . Despite being embellished in – with in situ carvings of the sunk fifteen feet into the ground and surrounded by Winds in Bibury stone by John Bacon (Fig. ) , houses, its structure and carved decoration remained creator of the splendidly solid statue of the lawyer Sir largely intact, and Stuart and Revett’s meticulous William Blackstone in the Codrington library at All drawings allowed it to serve as the inspiration for a Souls College ( ) and one of the most successful garden temple at West Wycombe (Buckinghamshire) English sculptors of his age. His figures echo the of , possibly designed by Revett, and for Stuart’s Athenian originals, which had been illustrated by Temple of the Winds at Shugborough (Staffordshire), Stuart and Revett, but they do not copy them; and of c. – . Neither of these structures are precise they have something of the linear energy of William copies of the Tower of the Winds, and in the Blake’s drawings , while at the same time anticipating observatory Wyatt took even greater liberties with the carvings of the Winds made by Eric Gill and others original, inserting large windows and varying the for Charles Holden’s London Transport headquarters lengths of the eight sides so as to turn the plan into a at Broadway, London, in – . Bacon also square with canted corners rather than a true octagon. designed the metal figures of Atlas and Hercules But, for all its lack of archaeological accuracy ‒ never supporting the copper Globe at the top of the building, an important aim for Wyatt ‒ the tower makes a installed in August . The remaining sculptures, statement of the utmost significance for the future of over the first-floor windows (Fig. ), are of Coade architecture in Europe. The use of a Grecian source, stone, in the production of which Bacon had been albeit of a late, Hellenistic, type, for a public building involved since the firm’s inception . They consist of was virtually unprecedented in the s, and it must a series of rectangular plaques of the signs of the
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Zodiac by J.F.C. Rossi, the son of an Italian emigrant, in about , and longer panels of Morning , Noon and Evening (Fig. ) by Rossi, based on drawings by Robert Smirke, father of the architect of the British Museum ( ) . Breaking up the otherwise plain surfaces of the building, these panels further underline its function and meaning, thus adding to its ‘decided character’. The interior of the central block comprised a ground-floor entrance hall flanked by two smaller Fig. . Carvings of the Winds on the frieze of the tower. rooms, with a staircase mounting up from behind the Green College, Oxford. hall to the lecture room ‒ the ‘room for experimental philosophy’ demanded by Hornsby in ‒ and the ‘room for occasional observations’ in the tower. Nothing was done to fit up these rooms until , when Wyatt was asked to prepare estimates for decorating the lecture room, though two years later Hornsby was complaining of his neglect in not carrying out the work : an almost universal vexation for Wyatt’s clients. It was completed in , and was followed in by the lecture room and in – by the observatory room . When finally completed, the rooms offered one of the most satisfying ‘architectural promenades’ (to use Le Corbusier’s phrase) in Oxford, Fig. . Coade stone plaques of the Signs of the Zodiac demonstrating a progression from darkness to on the south front. Geoffrey Tyack. abundant light and, perhaps, from ignorance to enlightenment. The entrance hall (now Green College’s common room) was originally entered from the south through a porch modelled directly on the entrances to the Tower of the Winds (Fig. ). It is a relatively low, shadowy room (Fig. ) surrounded by massive Tuscan columns from which spring strange, quasi-Gothic ribs embellished with roundels, which may be of Coade stone . From the far side the staircase mounts to the former lecture room (now the college dining room), a much lighter room with a delicate Adam-esque plaster ceiling similar to that of the hall at Worcester College ( –) and arched Fig. . Coade stone panel of Evening on the north front. openings leading into barrel-vaulted bays for storing Green College, Oxford. apparatus (since closed off) to the north-west and north-east (Fig. ).
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Fig. .The south porch. Geoffrey Tyack.
Fig. . The entrance hall, c. . Bodleian Library, Oxford.
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Fig. . The former lecture room, c. . Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The observatory on the top floor (Fig. ) is the which a Mr Mackell was paid £ in . The most beautiful, though from a practical point of view domed ceiling is broken up by delicately embellished the least essential, room in the building. Here Wyatt ‘ribs’ recalling Wyatt’s hall ceiling at Heveningham made no attempt to echo the Grecian language of the Hall, Suffolk ( c. –). Wyatt was ordered in to Tower of the Winds, whose interior was both plain and supply furnishings including a mahogany ladder, a dark. Instead he chose the model of a Roman-inspired set of steps, six mahogany chairs and a telescope domed rotunda, as in his mausoleum for Lord stand for the ‘upper room’, chairs and a table for Yarborough at Brocklesby, Lincolnshire ( – ) ; the lecture room, and six chairs for the entrance hall, here, however, the room is flooded with light from and several of these items survive in the building, tall windows, two of which (on the east and west though the telescopes shown in Ackermann’s sides) could be opened from ground level to allow engraving of have long been removed . the telescopes to be taken out onto the adjoining The Radcliffe Observatory did not leave any roofs. Corinthian columns flank the window opening s progeny in Oxford, or indeed anywhere else. Advances (in contrast to the heavy and ‘primitive’ Tuscan in the science and technology of telescopes made columns of the entrance hall), and above them is a quadrants, zenith sectors and tower observatories gallery with an iron balustrade reached by an iron virtually redundant by the early th century. The staircase of complex, somewhat Soaneian, design, for future belonged to lower, domed buildings like those
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Fig. . The interior of the tower, c. . Bodleian Library, Oxford.
THE GEORGIAN GROUP JOURNAL VOLUME X THE MAKING OF THE RADCLIFFE OBSERVATORY erected at Edinburgh ( ) , and Cambridge and in it was finally abandoned by the Radcliffe ( ) , housing refracting telescopes of much Trustees, who moved their observing operations to greater range than the instruments in the Radcliffe South Africa . Increasingly encroached upon to the Observatory. They were capable of examining the south by the Radcliffe Infirmary, the building was surfaces of the stars and planets, not just their then used for many years by the Nuffield Institute for movements. A heliometer for such telescopes was Medical Research, and in – it was refaced built to the south-east of the Observatory in , under the direction of Marshall Sisson, using Weldon followed in – by another domed structure stone in place of the decayed Headington ashlar of (since demolished) for another, more powerful, lower floors and wings, though the more durable telescope to the south-west; meanwhile a totally new Windrush stone of the tower was allowed to remain observatory was built on the southern edge of the (Fig. ) . In it was taken over by Green College, University Parks, to the designs of the younger a new post-graduate foundation, and it has since Charles Barry, in – . In a sense the Radcliffe flourished as a common room, dining room and Observatory was always a magnificent anachronism, library for that college’s members.
Fig. . The central block from the south-east. Geoffrey Tyack.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS G.E.C[okayne], The Complete Peerage , VI, London, I am grateful to Wilbur Wright for drawing the plan (Fig. ); , . to the Radcliffe Trust for permission to reproduce Figs. , Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, c. , March . ‒; to the Bodleian Library for permission to reproduce Ibid , February ; Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, Fig. (MS Top. Oxon. b. , f. ) and Figs. , – (MS c. . d.d. Radcliffe, d. , ff. , , , ); and to the Warden and Dale, op. cit ., –. The other trustees present at the Fellows of Green College for inviting me to give the meeting in March were Lord North, Sir William Radcliffe Lecture in , on which this article is based. Drake of Shardeloes (Buckinghamshire) and Sir William Dolben of Finedon Hall (Northants). The minutes record that they were shown the new elevation because of an order from Lord Lichfield, but it is not certain NOTES whether this was the recently deceased rd Earl or his The only extended architectural study of the successor. Observatory is Christopher Hussey, ‘The Radcliffe These works are discussed in Geoffrey Tyack, Oxford: Observatory’, Country Life , LXVII , May , , an Architectural Guide , Oxford, , –. – . The building is also discussed in Anthony Edward Tatham, Oxonia Explicata et Ornata , Oxford, Dale, James Wyatt , Oxford, , and in M.C. , . Donnelly, A Short History of Observatories , Eugene, Colvin, op. cit ., . Oregon, , –. Ibid ., . R.T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford , II, Oxford, Wyatt’s Oxford work is discussed in Tyack, op. cit. , , –. – . This paragraph is based on Donnelly, op. cit ., et seq .. Guest, op. cit., . Donnelly, op.cit. , . There is a photograph of the stable block in its original Gunther, op.cit. , . condition in Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, d. , f. . Ibid , . The Professor’s house is now used by the college for Ivor Guest, John Radcliffe and His Trust , London, offices and student accommodation. , , –. Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, e. , f. . Ibid ., –. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS CCC (X). Oxford, Bodleian Library (hereafter Bodleian), MS The drawing is reproduced in Colin Harrison (ed.), d.d. Radcliffe, e. , ff –. The relevant part of the letter John Malchair of Oxford , Oxford, , . is transcribed in Gunther, op.cit ., –, and Guest, op. Guest, op. cit ., –; Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, d. cit. , –. , f. . A. Chapman, ‘Thomas Hornsby and the Radcliffe Gunther, op.cit ., . Observatory’, in John Fauvel, Raymond Flood & The cornice moulding may also be of Coade stone Robin Wilson (eds.), Oxford Figures: Years of the [Alison Kelly, Mrs. Coade’s Stone , Upton-on-Severn, Mathematical Sciences , Oxford, , –. I am , ]. The paterae featured in the Coade grateful to Robin Wilson for letting me see the relevant catalogue for [ibid ., ]. part of this book before publication. Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe c. , February ; Illustrated in Donnelly, op.cit. , . The tower was MS d.d. Radcliffe, e. , f. . flanked by lower buildings leading to pavilions. Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, c. , May . Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, c. (Trustees’ Minute Bodleian, MS Top. Oxon., b. , f. ; Bodleian, MS Book – ), May . d.d. Radcliffe, c. , November . Guest, op. cit., . Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, e. , f. . Howard Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, c. , May , Architects – , New Haven and London, , March ; MS dd. Radcliffe, c. , May . –. Quoted in Donnelly, op.cit , . Guest, op. cit ., ; Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, e. , ff. Ibid , – . – . The Ionic capitals are also of Coade stone. Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe c. ; Jackson’s Oxford Oxonia Explicata et Ornata , nd ed., Oxford, , Journal , June . –.
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D.S. Robertson, Greek and Roman Architecture , Ibid ., May ; MS d.d. Radcliffe, c. , June Cambridge, , –. ; MS d.d. Radcliffe, e. , f. . James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Dale, op. cit ., . Athens , I, London, , . Nikolaus Pevsner, John Harris and Nicholas Antram, Nikolaus Pevsner and Elizabeth Williamson, The The Buildings of England: Lincolnshire , London, , Buildings of England: Buckinghamshire , London, –; J. Lord, ‘The Building of the Mausoleum at , ; Anne Purchas, ‘Nicholas Revett’s Island Brocklesby’, Church Monuments , VII, . Temple, West Wycombe Park’, Georgian Group Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, c. , May . Mackell Journal , V, , , n. ; Colvin, op. cit ., . was presumably either John Mackell, who worked at I owe this point to the fascinating exhibition on ‘The Somerset House, London, in – , or James, who Story of Time’ held at the Queen’s House, Greenwich worked for Soane at No. , St. James’s Square, from December to September . A London, between and , and at the Law Courts picture of a water clock was included in Barbaro’s in – [History of the King’s Works , V, ; Survey edition of Vitruvius ( ). of London , XXIX, ]. A London smith, J. Mackell, Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, e. , f. . also worked under Soane at Wimpole Hall, This point was made by Katharine Esdaile, ‘The Cambridgeshire, in [National Trust, Wimpole Radcliffe Observatory’, Journal of the Royal Society of Hall guidebook, , ]. I am grateful to Richard Arts , LXXVIII, , –. Hewlings for these references to Mackell. Judith Collins, Eric Gill: Sculpture , London, , Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, c. , May ; –. Rudolph Ackermann, History of the University of Guest, op. cit ., ; Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, e. , f. Oxford , II, London, , –. . There was a payment of £ s for the globe on A.J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh , May to ‘Horsley and Catherwood’ [Bodleian, MS Edinburgh, , . d.d. Radcliffe c. ], the latter presumably Thomas For the Cambridge observatory, see Robert Willis & Catherwood, who supplied a brass fireplace for the John Willis Clark, The Architectural History of the Library at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, in [Michael University of Cambridge , III, Cambridge, , Bevington, Stowe Guide , , ]. I am grateful to – . The first observatory in Cambridge was built Richard Hewlings for this reference. on the gate tower of Trinity College in . Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors For the history of the buildings in the nineteenth and – , London, , . twentieth centuries, see Guest, op. cit. , , –; Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, e. , f. . For Rossi, see Chapman, loc. cit ., –. Gunnis, op. cit ., –. Guest, op. cit. , –. Bodleian, MS d.d. Radcliffe, c. , May , May W. F. Oakeshott (ed.), Oxford Stone Restored , Oxford, and June . , –.
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