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Exeter College might be one of the smaller of Oxford University’s academic institutions, but it has its fair share of celebrated alumni (which it calls Old Members) and for many it is archetypal Oxford.
Certainly it was for the makers of the Morse television programme, who killed off their fictitious inspector on the front quad, and for Philip Pullman, himself an Exonian, whose Jordan College in the His Dark Materials trilogy recently turned into a film was based on Exeter.
The buildings of the college set the scene, including its Bath stone chapel, which some have argued is the most beautiful in Oxford, that forms one side of the quad, and the nearby library, both the works of the celebrated Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott, although the chapel also incorporates a little medieval stonework from the original Oxford town wall.
But, fine though the Chapel is, with its form inspired by Saint Chapelle in Paris, bits of its Gothic revival carved stonework were falling off by the time Oxford stone specialists J Joslin won, at competitive tender, the contract to repair it.
The College architect, Robert Montgomery, whose practice is in Osney Mead, inspected the stonework from accessible parts of the roof and a cherry picker. “It’s a well-designed building, all-be-it a little ornate,” he told NSS. “But the stone was in poor condition generally after many years of exposure.”
The carving at the upper levels was particularly in need of attention and it was the ability of Joslins masons to reproduce the carved detail using traditional stonemasonry skills that helped the company gain the £1million contract.
And Joslins are helping to preserve those masonry skills for the future, too. They have six apprentices, two in each year of the three-year block-release course at Bath College. Joslins employ a total of 35 people in their workshop, computer-aided design department, offices and on-site. CAD was introduced 21/2 years ago to supplement the draughtsmen’s skills and was used for the stone detail drawings at Exeter College Chapel.
As well as the masons, the workshops house primary and secondary saws, including an Anderson Grice built in the same year that Managing Director Neville McLean was born and soon to be replaced with a new frame saw. There is also a Van Voorden that is about to be automated to carry out profiling.
Although it is often difficult to pinpoint the exact source of original stone, the architect believes the stone used to build the Grade II Listed Exeter College Chapel was, at least in part, Box Ground Bath stone, which has not been available for many years. He determined that the best match now available was Hartham Park Bath stone from Corsham in Wiltshire, supplied by Hanson Bath & Portland.
Because the College did not want the whole chapel surrounded in scaffolding, the work was divided into three stages, the first of which is now complete, the second is under way and the third will begin once the current stage is finished.
Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the chapel and the 700th anniversary of the college. But the anniversaries are not the reason for the work having been carried out now. It just needed doing, says Bob Malpass, Clerk of Works.
“The stonework had deteriorated,” he says. “The majority of the detail had gone.”
The project has been carried out in phases to minimise the disruption caused by the work to the college and the Chapel. The Chapel remains open while the work is carried out and continues to be used for services, including weddings and funerals. One of the attractions of the venue is that it makes a desirable backdrop to photographs. Scaffold sheets clearly detract from that and carrying out the work in phases has meant that only part of the chapel is covered at any one time and that each part that is covered is obscured for as short a time as possible.
As Neville McLean says: “You can’t just take over the site. We have erected scaffolding for each stage, whereas ideally you would have put scaffolding round the whole building and done the work in one go.”
The project involves the replacement of 15 ornately carved gablets, with their gargoyles and grotesques. Only half a dozen of their niches for statues are actually filled. There has been some talk about completing the others with statues depicting some of today’s college personnel.
String course carvings and the pierced parapet on the Chapel are being replaced with stones weighing up to a tonne each being lifted on to the scaffolding and into place using block and tackle. That means the scaffolding has to be checked by engineers to make sure it is capable of supporting the weight.
As is often the case, hard cement repairs and repointing in previous decades exacerbated the problems encountered in the current phases of restoration, which have used lime mortars throughout.
An unusual problem was encountered before Christmas when high winds rocked the lead-covered wooden spire by as much as six inches and the masons abandoned the scaffolding fearing the spire would fall on to them.
Engineers were called in to reinforce the structure with stainless steel fixings. The spire is to be repaired but Neville McLean says it is not work that will be carried out by Joslins. He says they do use subcontractors for timber and lead work where it is part of a stone restoration project, but in this case the spire will form a separate contract and it is not work that forms the mainstream of Joslins’ activities.
When the work is finished, a piece of the original Victorian stonework will be displayed in the Chapel on a plinth that Joslins will donate to the college especially for the purpose. Disposal of the rest of the original stonework has not been much of a problem, either, as a fair amount of it has been collected as souvenirs.
