Merton College Oxford

The choir of the chapel at Merton is a fine piece of medieval building, completed in 1294. The superb Decorated east window, seen here, still has its original glass set in among the tracery. The work was supervised by Walter of Cuddington, a fellow of the college, whose records of materials purchased and builders hired survive. Did he have an unknown master mason design it, of did he do that himself? The later Perpendicular tower was from around 1450. To the left is the Hall, originally put up before 1277, but heavily restored, once by James Wyatt of Fonthill fame in 1794 and then by Gilbert Scott of St Pancras fame in 1874, so it is not easy to say who did what. The range of buildings on the right, including the Gatehouse, date from the 1400s, though also heavily restored, this time by Edward Blore who also designed the extraordinaryly eclectic Vorontsov Palace in the Ukraine, completed in 1848 just before the Crimean War, and Churchills quarters during the Yalta Conference in 1945.