The completion of restoration work at St John’s College Oxford

A thirty or do year long project to restore the historic buildings of St John’s College in Oxford has been completed with work on the Laudian Library.

The work has already seen the re-roofing of the ranges surrounding the fifteenth century Front Quad with the appropriate traditional Cotswold stone slates instead of nineteenth century Welsh slate and extensive work on Archbishop Laud’s Canterbury Quad, which is unquestionably one of the outstanding architectural glories of Oxford.

The last stages of the work is outlined in an article from The Art Newspaper. This reveals some of the discoveries made during the restoration work and what that reveals about life in the College in the seventeenth century. The article can be seen at DIY insulation and cow bones: Oxford college renovation reveals what life was like as a 17th-century student