Buildings
Formed from a number of Georgian houses on the Bailey between Durham Cathedral and the River Wear, the college's setting is spectacular. The main house is Haughton House. The houses which make up Cranmer Hall were once owned by the Bowes-Lyon family (the late Queen Mother's family). The majority of the college buildings are grade II listed, with parts of 3 and 4 South Bailey grade II* listed. Linton House, no 1 South Bailey, is Grade 1 listed and has much earlier origins. Before coming into the possession of St John's, it was the main property of St. Chad's College. The frontage seen today was added to an existing timber framed building after the Restoration of the Monarchy.
No 2 South Bailey has distinctive circular 'blind' windows which were revealed during a re-rendering in the 1980s, and enabled Martin Roberts, then Durham City's Conservation Officer, to date the building very precisely to the late 17th century.
The illogically interconnected nature of many of the college buildings regularly results in visitors becoming quite lost. The similarly bizarre nature of college stairways, one of which surprises the unwary by disappearing into a solid wall, adds an element of Escher to the architecture.
The college chapel, dedicated to St Mary, and known as St Mary the Less, is of Norman origin and was rebuilt in the 1840s, and was re-ordered at the turn of the 21st century. It became the college chapel in 1919, before which it had been the parish church of the South Bailey. It is still a chapel of ease in the parish of St Oswald.
Read more about this topic: St John's College, Durham
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)