Sir – The recent acquisition of Turner’s The High Street, Oxford by the Ashmolean, gives us a pre-photography view of our celebrated street.
Looking more closely, it also possibly reveals a site of local interest, viz, the building in which the 17th-century scientist Robert Boyle made some of his discoveries about the nature of gases.
Boyle lived there between 1655 and 1668. You can see the location, just past University College’s buildings on the left side. The domed Shelley Memorial of 1893 now occupies the site. At the extreme end is the just-visible St Martin’s Church (Carfax). Apart from the tower, the rest of the church was rebuilt (larger) in about 1820, some ten years after the painting was made.
It, too, succumbed to the needs of the time, being dismantled in the late 1890s because it caused problems with the increasing amount of traffic around Carfax. The tower remains, the only part of what was once our formal city church.
S.Wyatt
Oxford
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