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Oxford  -  All Saints Church
18th century

Click on photos to enlarge.
Notes in italics from Oxfordshire by Jennifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner (1974)
Yale University Press, New Haven and London.



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All Saints church in the High Street ... erected in 1706-8, we do not know to whose design. Dean Aldrich is named as the designer by Peshall in 1773, and that may be true. ... All Saints is one of the most perfect English churches of its date, with none of the Baroque violence of Hawksmoor's churches and yet with more force than Gibbs'. The church consists of a perfectly straightforward oblong body without aisles or separate chancel or apse and a W tower wholly projecting, i.e. not rising seemingly out of the body of the church as Gibbs used to allow it to happen. The tower is square below, rusticated in its lowest stage and provided with plain arched windows. The aprons of the windows have something of Vanbrugh's and Hawksmoor's bluntness. The bell-openings are arched, too, and the arches stand on extremely broad pilasters. The angles have rusticated pilasters. Then follow the recessed rotunda with its detached columns and the little spire. Rotunda and spire play an important role in the skyline of Oxford. The steeple was probably modified from the original design after Hawksmoor had been consulted ... The sides of the church have in the first bay to N as well as S a big portico of paired Corinthian columns with a pediment. The sides then, and the end wall as well, have plain arched windows between paired pilasters. There is an attic too, with short, segment-headed windows.      


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North view from Turl Street

All Saints church is now the library  of Lincoln College.  

Interior picture 1901


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