The Common Room
scholars' club
The club of all four academies: a long panelled room of worn leather armchairs, chess tables and a dark bar where tea is served from a brass urn and gin is made in the Margin from the Edge juniper. In...
scholars' club
The club of all four academies: a long panelled room of worn leather armchairs, chess tables and a dark bar where tea is served from a brass urn and gin is made in the Margin from the Edge juniper. In...
refectory
The one room in Recto where all four academies eat at once: a long whitewashed hall with dark beams and a single oak table running its whole length, eighty-one metres, laid twice a day. The highest h ...
trench settlement
In 1971 two academies tried to secede by cutting the Band down the middle. The mathematicians of the Grove worked out, too late, what would happen if they finished: a band with one half twist cut alon...
banquet hall
The great hall where the Congress of Academies held its closing banquet on 30 September 1958 and voted, between the fish and the toasts, to be reviewed by its peers alone. It has been kept exactly as ...
covered walk
The house of the Lyceum is not a house but a walk: a covered colonnade of limestone piers under a low timber roof that runs the whole length of the Band, fourteen kilometres, so that a scholar can wal...
registry
The Congress building of 1958, a long hall of pale limestone with tall north windows and a skylight of white glass, and since 1961 the seat of the Index. Down its middle stand forty grey punched-card ...
wrestling school
The house of the Grove: the university gymnasium of 1903, a square court of deep yellow sand enclosed by a plain Doric colonnade of limestone, with seminar rooms behind the columns. Over the entrance,...
press and archive
The old university press, four storeys of dark brick and pale limestone at the foot of the College hill, where the Proceedings of Recto have been set and printed every week since 1959. The typesetting...
watch house
A weathered wooden watch house on posts at the end of a stubble field, built by the Observatory in 1960 to measure the Edge and kept since by the farmers of the Margin. There is a veranda, a bench fac...
observatory
A square limestone tower of 1898 at the highest point of the Colleges, carrying three domes of green copper whose shutters have been patched with tin. The great refractor of 1912 in the largest dome w...
anatomical theatre
Built in 1911 for the medical faculty after the theatre at Padua: a funnel of six elliptical tiers of dark walnut, so steep that the top rail hangs almost over the floor, and in the roof a round oculu...
exchange
A covered market hall of cast iron and glass from 1889 at the heart of the Arcades, where every review in Recto has a price before it is fought. Tall slate boards line the walls; at noon the odds go u...