Look no further, reader – you’ve found the ugliest building in the world. That’s according to art historian Sir Kenneth Clark and his Oxford University classmates. Then again, these bright minds also falsely believed Keble College to have been designed by John Ruskin, that admirer of the Venetian style to which this Gothic Revival masterpiece owes its polychromy – the multi-coloured bricks.
As often happens, it was the bright minds’ dimmest ideas that caught on. Oscar Wilde described Oxford as the most beautiful city in England “in spite of Keble College.” You might overhear students at rival colleges quipping, “What separates men from beasts? The Keble porter’s lodge.” There existed (and may still exist) a Destroy Keble Society, founded by undergraduates at the neighbouring St John’s College who believed Keble infringed on their view. There are stories of Keble students waking in the night to the sounds of chisels on stone. Even John Ruskin, the man mistakenly named (or blamed) as the building’s architect and whose own The Stones of Venice propounds grotesqueness as a virtue of Gothic architecture, described Keble College as “a dinosaur in a Fairisle sweater.”
I consider myself an admirer of Keble College and so I don’t want to encourage this kind of talk. But I was surprised to find no insults working the angle of the college’s original funding. The Gibbs family, whose fortune funded the college, made their money importing fertiliser. “Where there’s muck there’s brass, candelabra and other decorative items for the celebration of the eucharist,” writes painter Matthew Rice in his beautifully illustrated book Oxford.
With this muck, or the money from it, architect William Butterfield constructed Keble College between 1869 and 1882. It took its name from John Keble, a member of the clandestine Oxford Movement. He and his fellow members believed that the reformed Church of England should bring back some of its older Catholic traditions and return to simpler times. The red brick Gothic Revival architecture of Keble College summed up the Oxford Movement’s vision. It was the past and the future, the ecclesiastical alongside the industrial. Gothic Revival had, until that time, been simply an imitation of what had come before. But Butterfield set out to establish a new Gothic style that would “both convey eternal truths and would express the spirit of the age.” In the polychromatic pattern, Butterfield hoped to show how he saw life – stable to start with but growing more complex the closer we get to heaven.
Critics said it was ugly. Admirers blamed the backlash on good old-fashioned fear of change. And things were changing fast.
Keble was the first new college in Oxford in 150 years. It was the first to abandon the city’s iconic stone in favour of brick. Across the city, Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College had opened in 1879, welcoming women to Oxford. Gothic Revival architecture was supplanting the classical which had itself usurped original Gothic. Things in Oxford were changing faster than they had since the Reformation and none of the bright minds liked it.
Well, almost none of them.
“I hope you will long continue to work out your beautiful and original style,” wrote poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins to Butterfield in 1877. “I do not think this generation will ever admire it.” He was right. Keble is now a Grade 1 listed building.
If you’re in the area, the Martyrs’ Memorial is a tribute to another of the city’s great upheavals – the Reformation of the English Church. And if you’re in the mood, sister college Selwyn in Cambridge makes similar use of red brick Gothic Revival architecture.