My bike-borne peregrinations in Oxford took me in Sunday’s sunshine into Mansfield Road and to a fine piece of Oxford’s architecture previously unknown to me.

This is the new Siew-Sngiem Clocktower and Sukum Navampam Gate at the front of Harris Manchester College, both named for their principal benefactors.

They were completed 18 months ago, so my discovery of them now shows, by my standards, rare observational skills.

Both are the work of Yiangou Architects whose commission had been to produced an addition to the streetscape with ‘jewel-like quality’.

The eye-catching design certainly succeeds in brightening the austere architecture of the rest of the college buildings.

The development has rightly gained the approval of Oxford Preservation Trust which gave it a commendation last year.

A notable feature of the tower is the six-faced clock made by Derby Clockmakers.

Beneath carved in stone, facing the street, is the legend: “It’s later than you think.” To the right is carved: “But it’s never too late.”

The first is a saying familiar to me from WH Auden’s poem Consider and from the song Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think.

Had I seen the clocktower a few days earlier, I would have been able to ask Nigel Rees, the Quote... Unquote presenter, about its origin. He would have properly told me it was a Chinese proverb.

When I net Nigel at the Wolfson College party for the Isaiah Berlin letters last week, I asked him about a quote about another building.

“C’est magnifique, mais n’est pas la gare” (It’s magnificent but it’s not the station) is claimed in the memoirs of politician Steve Norris to be about his own college, Worcester. I had always thought it was about Balliol.

Norris was right, ruled Nigel, with its station-style clock accounting for the joke.