Just another brick in the wall: John Ruskin and the 'loathsome' Brasenose Lane

While Ruskin regarded Oxford as a 'temple of Apollo', he was less kind about its alleys

20 October 2014 • 6:59am

Brasenose Lane street sign, Oxford University, Oxfordshire, England — Brasenose Lane: Love and loathing in the back alleys of Oxford Credit: Photo: Alamy

SIR – Michael Henderson describes being subject to a revelation of beauty looking down Brasenose Lane from the Radcliffe Camera.

He’s not the only person to have had a vivid experience there. When John Ruskin gave his Slade Lecture, “The Relation to Art of the Science of Light”, in 1872, he told his audience about a negative epiphany in the same place.

The university he regarded as the “temple of Apollo”; but, he said, “in the centre of that temple, at the very foot of the dome of the Radclyffe, between two principal colleges, the lane by which I walked from my own college half an hour ago to this place – Brasen-nose Lane – is left in a state as loathsome as a back alley in the East end of London.”

Bernard Richards
Brasenose College, Oxford