Chapel of Brasenose College, Oxford

The Chapel of Brasenose College, Oxford, dedicated to St Hugh and St Chad, is one of the most curious and engaging buildings in a university full of them: a seventeenth-century chapel that wears Gothic tracery, Renaissance swags, cherubs, Corinthian capitals and a plaster fan vault all at once, concealing within its roof space a genuine fifteenth-century hammerbeam roof carried bodily across Oxford from a demolished medieval college. Built between 1656 and 1666 during the upheavals of the Commonwealth and Restoration, consecrated by the Bishop of Oxford in 1666, it stands on the south side of the college overlooking Radcliffe Square, and its unapologetic mixture of styles has delighted and scandalised critics ever since.

Brasenose, founded in 1509, made do for a century and a half with a modest first-floor chapel beside the hall, in the space that is now the Senior Common Room, in use by 1521 and entered through an Outward Chapel from Staircase I; the blocked tracery windows can still be traced in the walls. The ecclesiastical furnishings promised by the founder, Bishop William Smyth, seem never to have arrived, presumed appropriated by the college's first Visitor, Cardinal Wolsey, but two chalices and two patens of the late fifteenth century survive, older than the plate of Corpus or Trinity. The college steered a wary course through the Reformation: its dean Thomas Hawarden was summoned before the King's Privy Council for resisting reform, five Fellows quit under Queen Mary because the Catholic mass was not restored quickly enough, and even as the college later housed Protestant luminaries such as the martyrologist John Foxe and Alexander Nowell, six Brasenose fellows were executed for loyalty to the pope, John Shert, Thomas Cottam and Laurence Johnson dying at Tyburn in 1582, a toll exceeded only by St John's.

The new chapel was the legacy of Principal Samuel Radcliffe, who had crowned Old Quad with its attic storey in the 1630s but died in 1648 with his greater plans unbuilt. His will directed the sale of the manor of Piddington, a year's profits to the poor of Rochdale, £1,000 to the chapel, and the use of materials from the college's tenement by the Starre, that is, the former St Mary's College off Cornmarket Street, whose buildings Brasenose had owned since 1580. Disputes over the will delayed the start for eight years, but the sale raised £1,850, subscriptions eventually totalled £4,775, and the bursar, Mr Houghton, was given sole charge of the works in 1657, recording every payment in The Book of Accounts for the New Buildings, begun Anno Domini 1656, rediscovered among the college papers in the Victorian era. There was no contractor and no architect in the modern sense: the practical direction lay with John Jackson, the overseer at twenty shillings a week, who is generally believed to have been the chapel's designer, and who had probably built the famous baroque porch of the University Church of St Mary a generation earlier. The accounts breathe the life of the site: timber felled in the college's Mynchery Wood from 1651, with five shillings to the poor man that had his leg broken in plucking down a tree; the slates stripped from the old chapel of St Mary's College and its precious roof carted to Brasenose in March 1656, the workmen paid three shillings extra for the dangerous work; the foundation stone laid on Wednesday 18 June 1656, the foundations twenty feet deep and finished by the first of August; straw bought to thatch the unfinished walls against the winter; ironwork shipped from Birmingham by water to Banbury, the helpful Birmingham schoolmaster rewarded with two pairs of gloves with black fingers and a pair of white kid's leather. The master carver Symon White, at twenty-two pence a day the best-paid man on the site, finished his swags and capitals by December 1658, the London joiners panelled the interior in 1662, White laid the marbles in 1666, and that year Walter Blandford, Lord Bishop of Oxford, performed the solemn act of consecration. Chapel and library together had cost some £4,000, at a time when the college's whole annual income was about £600.

The building's celebrated oddity is its roof. The old chapel of St Mary's College, built perhaps as early as 1440, had a fine open-timbered hammerbeam roof, which was dismantled, stored in sheds in the college, and re-erected over the new chapel, its trusses carefully spaced to the new windows. But an open hammerbeam roof was evidently not wanted: Jackson was paid £20 for his model of the roof, and beneath the medieval timbers he designed and hung an ingenious fan-vaulted ceiling of wood and plaster, its pendants springing from the points of the hidden hammerbeams, plastered from June 1659, a design almost identical to the vault over the choir of Christ Church Cathedral. The result, late as it seems for fan vaulting, was entirely natural in Oxford, where the fan vaults of St Mary's porch and the Christ Church staircase had been built in 1637 and 1640. The chapel has often been attributed to Christopher Wren, who was indeed in Oxford in 1656, but the building lacks his unity of proportion, predates any evidence of his architectural interests, and has far more in common with the school of Inigo Jones's carver Nicholas Stone; the attribution to Jackson stands. The exterior, with classical bays and buttresses crowned by urns, the bottle creasts bought from Burford, and a frontispiece bearing the King's arms over the cloister door toward what is now Radcliffe Square, completes the hybrid: in one historian's summary, late Gothic tracery, Renaissance swags of fruit and foliage, cherubs and cusps, fan-vaulting and Corinthian capitals together.

The centuries since have added their layers. The splendid brass eagle lectern, standing on a globe inscribed with the donor's arms, was given by Thomas Lee Dummer in 1731 and took three days to fix; Sir Darcey Lever of Accrington gave £50 toward the marble altarpiece in 1733; crimson velvet furniture and gilded altar rails arrived in 1748-49; and the two gilt chandeliers, given by William Drake of Shardeloes in 1749, spent twenty-three Victorian years on loan to Coleshill Church. Oxford's corrosive air forced repeated repairs: £350 of slating and lead in 1779, a major interior renovation in 1819 when ceiling and walls were cleaned and the reredos regilded, and from 1841 a phased refacing of the decayed exterior under Philip Hardwick, whose report found the south wall seven inches out of true; the displaced window tracery was carried off to Denton House near Cuddesdon and built into a garden wall, the east window set up entire. The ante-chapel was refaced and its pinnacles renewed in Taynton stone in 1869. In 1892-93 Principal Charles Buller Heberden, the college's first lay head, personally paid for a new organ, set over the screen on new ante-chapel pillars, and in 1902 funded the careful restoration of the marble reredos; in 1895 Charles Eamer Kempe recoloured the ceiling, an Arts and Crafts flourish that prompted one 1970s commentator to declare that anything as strange and curious as Arts and Crafts aestheticism overlaid on seventeenth-century fake Gothic, which in turn disguises a genuine fifteenth-century hammer-beam roof, is certainly worth keeping, if only for the sheer zaniness of it all.

The present organ was installed in 1973 within the late Victorian case and rebuilt in 2002-3. Among the chapel's quieter treasures are the fifteenth-century chalices and patens of the foundation era and a painted memento of one of the college's strangest visitors: a portrait, with a separate painting of one enormous hand, of the Childe of Hale, the Lancashire giant recorded at nine feet three inches, who called at Brasenose in 1617 on his way home from London. The chapel today is open to members of all denominations under its chaplain, the Reverend David Sheen, serving the college in worship and pastoral care, a working chapel whose mixture of ages and manners, medieval roof, Commonwealth walls, Georgian eagle, Victorian colour, has come to seem not a muddle but a portrait of Oxford itself.